HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for four games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen four different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the tables below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | BEVGA GeForce GTX 275 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 290.56 | 280.1 | 243.2 | 387.34 | 296 |
214.39 |
192.32 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 234.98 |
228.42 |
205.57 | 288.38 | 231.58 |
186.58 |
169.53 |
| Current price, including VAT | £375? | £310 | £225 | £550 | £350 | £275 | £199 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.627 | 0.737 | 0.914 | 0.524 | 0.661 | 0.678 | 0.852 |
* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.
Evaluation
All cards can run each gaming title at 1,920x1,200. The Sapphire TOXIC's normalised scores are higher than a GeForce GTX 295's, but the performance increase over a generic card isn't compensated by an equal or greater increase in the gaming scores.
Overclocking
Giving it some overclocking fun, we managed to hit a final speed of 975MHz core and an effective 5,200MHz memory - up from the shipping 925MHz/5,000MHz clocks.
The magical 1,000MHz engine speed remains tantalisingly out of reach. As mentioned earlier, there's no method of increase the voltage to the card, perhaps sensibly so, because Radeon HD 5870 gets rather toasty at sky-high frequencies.
Default DiRT 2 performance at 1,920x1,200 is 80.02fps. The overclocked card produces a score of 83.11fps.
