HEXUS.bang4buck, temps, power-draw, overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,280x1,024 frame-rates for the three games 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 table and graph 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 4550 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB | XFX GeForce 9400 GT 512MB | XFX GeForce 9500 GT 256MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate marks at 1,280x1,024 | 59.55 |
58.74 |
154.66 | 45.12 | 79.19 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £45 | £40 | £65 | £40 | £53 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,280x1,024 | 1.32 |
1.47 |
2.38 |
1.13 | 1.49 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 30fps) at 1,280x1,024 | No (CoH, ET, CoD4) | No (CoH, ET, CoD4) | Yes | No (CoH, ET, CoD4) | No (CoH, CoD4) |
Here's the HEXUS.bang4buck graph at 1,280x1,024. The graph divides the aggregate score by the price.
| HEXUS.bang4buck @ 1,280x1,024 1,280x1,024 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB | XFX 9500 GT 256MB | XFX 9400GT 512MB DDR2 | Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB |
| 1.32 | 2.38 | 1.49 | 1.12 | 1.51 |
What we see here is that whilst the Radeon HD 4550 is considerably cheaper than the HD 4670, the latter's performance is markedly better, and it's worth spending more because you gain so much more performance: the increase is considerably better than linear.
Indeed, the HD 4550 is pretty similar to the outgoing HD 3650, apart from a better-performing video-acceleration block (UVD 2.0).
Power-draw and temps
We measured power-draw on an Intel D975XBX platform comprising of a dual-core E6750 Conroe CPU, 4GB RAM, and 500GB Seagate drive plugged in to an OCZ 700W GameXStream PSU. Idle was defined as the system doing nothing for five minutes and load as 3DMark06 1,920x1,200 4xAA 8xAF. Power-draw was measured at the mains via a watt-meter.| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB | XFX GeForce 9500 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power-draw idle | 117 |
112 |
140 |
| Power-draw load | 165 |
168 |
223 |
Just for kicks, we added a GeForce 7900 GTX (remember them?) to the basic table. The Radeon's reasonably well-matched to a GeForce 9500 GT in terms of idle and load power-draw.
With an ambient temperature of 21.5°C the sample card idled at 40°C which rose to 61.5°C under load, comparing favourably with the reference card. Incidentally, those are the same kind of temperatures attained by both GeForce cards in this line-up.
Overclocking
The base 600MHz/1,593MHz frequencies were pushed to 650MHz/1,700MHz with some simple overclocking. The ET:QW 1,680x1,050 framerate increase from an average of 18.15fps to 20.83 was nothing to shout about, knowing that a stock-clocked Radeon HD 4670 puts out 50fps in the same test.
