HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for five 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 five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table, below, highlights 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 | MSI Twin Frozr GeForce GTX 275 896MB | Inno3D GeForce GTX 275 896MB | ASUS GeForce GTX 260 896MB | HIS Radeon HD 4890 1,024MB | XFX Radeon HD 4870 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 X2 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 384.16 | 364.28 | 320.56 | 354.02 | 317.5 |
445.06 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 340.98 |
328.52 |
299.52 | 322.78 |
290.76 |
367.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £217 | £187 | £121 |
£159 | £98 | £159 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.571 | 1.757 | 2.475 | 2.03 |
2.97 |
2.31 |
* 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.Analysis
Such has been the recent savage price-chopping on mid-range cards that the HEXUS.bang4buck now looks a whole lot different than it did two months ago. The two standout cards are the default-clocked GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 512MB.
MSI's GeForce GTX 275 Frozr OC can be thought of as a faster GTX 260, to the tune of some 20 per cent , but current pricing is such that it's almost 80 per cent dearer. That's why, clearly, its HEXUS.bang4buck looks a lot lower. Indeed, most troubling for MSI is the availability of reference GTX 275s from £160, and Radeon HD 4890s for the same money.
Put simply, you're paying a significant premium for a better-than-reference cooler.
Overclocking
From the default 666/1,476/2,322MHz, we managed to crank the card up to 692MHz core, 1,533MHz shaders, and 2,554MHz memory - a reasonable boost on all fronts. However, the overclock is in line with a bunch of other GTX 260s cooled by the reference heatsink.
Rerunning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, which returned an average 92.3fps at the shipping clocks, overclocked performance rose to 97.3fps - an increase of around 5.4 per cent.
