BFG Technologies was a privately held

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

-based supplier of

power supplies A power supply is an electrical device that supplies electric power to an electrical load. The main purpose of a power supply is to convert electric current from a source to the correct voltage, current, and frequency to power the load. As a res ...

and

video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

s based on

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

graphics technology and a manufacturer of high-end gaming/home theater computer systems. BFG Technologies branded products were available in

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

and

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

at retailers and e-tailers. The company's main headquarters were located in Lake County,

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

, near Lake Forest.

Graphics cards

BFG manufactured graphics cards for mainstream to enthusiast level computers. They were known for their Asylum brand; however, the Nvidia 5 series of graphics accelerators were the last to use that name. They were best known by computer enthusiasts for the overclocked (OC) versions of their graphics cards, lifetime warranty and 24/7/365 U.S.-based technical support. BFG was among the first graphics card companies to offer cards that were already overclocked from manufacturer recommended speeds. Since then, many other manufacturers have copied BFG's model. Their most recent flagship graphics cards were the BFG Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 OCX as an air-cooled solution and the BFG Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 H2OC as a water-cooled solution. While they also manufactured an air-cooled version of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295, it was not overclocked. On May 21, 2010, John Slevin the chairman of BFG Technologies, announced that they would no longer be developing graphics cards, as it was not profitable for them. In August 2010, BFG began the process of

liquidation Liquidation is the process in accounting by which a company is brought to an end in Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and many other countries. The assets and property of the company are redistrib ...

, initially only for the GPU business but eventually expanding to include the entire company. As a result of this, BFG ceased to honor RMA ( Return Merchandise Authorization) requests for warranty service, repair, or replacement, instead returning the product to the customer with a short letter explaining the situation. However,

PNY Technologies PNY Technologies, Inc., doing business as PNY, is an American manufacturer of flash memory cards, USB flash drives, solid state drives, memory upgrade modules, portable battery chargers, computer locks, cables, chargers, adapters, and consumer an ...

announced that "PNY has stepped up and will be working to give BFG customers the ability to exchange their video cards for a coupon to purchase a PNY Video card at a discounted price". This exchange program ended on December 31, 2010 and PNY is no longer accepting requests for BFG cards. The BFG brand name of the company was subsequently acquired by Best Data, who also owns the

Diamond Multimedia Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackSta ...

brand.

Desktop computers

January 5, 2009, BFG Technologies launched its desktop computer line called Phobos that features a touch panel LCD with performance control, BFG Tech graphic cards, liquid cooling solutions from CoolIT and Intel processors.

Power supplies

BFG Technologies manufactured a full range of power supply units for

ATX ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended) is a motherboard and power supply configuration specification developed by Intel in 1995 to improve on previous de facto standards like the AT design. It was the first major change in desktop computer enclo ...

compatible PCs. BFG's power supply line up had consisted of 530W, 550W, 600W, 650W, 800W and 1000W in the past, but since was refined to separate categories for separate markets. The GS Series consisted of the GS-450, GS-550 and GS-650, 450W, 550W and 650W power supplies respectively, and were sold as mainstream units, rated at peak power and at room temperature and were sold almost exclusively at retail stores like

Best Buy Best Buy Co. Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was rebra ...

. The LS Series was BFG Technologies mainstream series, consisting of the LS-450 450W power supply, LS-550 550W power supply and LS-680 680W power supply. These were rated at continuous power and at a more realistic 40 °C. The flagship of BFG Technologies' power supply offerings was the ES Series, which only consisted of one model: The ES-800. This unit was not only rated at continuous and 40 °C, but featured a technology marketed as "Frequency Conversion" which is a term used to define a method of changing the switching frequency of the power supply to coincide with load. This allowed the unit to be as efficient as possible even at very low loads while conventional designs might have been significantly less efficient at loads below 10%. The ES Series was later replaced by the EX-Series; essentially an ES Series with a modular interface for removal of unused cables.

PhysX cards

BFG Technologies offered a 128MB PPU that uses Ageia's

PhysX PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU (expansion cards designed by Ag ...

processing chip and libraries. The card was only available in a

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Pro ...

version in retail packages.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bfg Technologies 2002 establishments in Illinois 2010 disestablishments in Illinois American companies established in 2002 American companies disestablished in 2010 Companies based in Lake Forest, Illinois Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010 Computer companies established in 2002 Computer companies disestablished in 2010 Computer power supply unit manufacturers Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Graphics hardware companies Motherboard companies Nvidia