HEXUS.bang4buck, temps, overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per 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 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 | Inno3D GeForce GTX 285 OVERCLOCK 1,024MB |
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB |
Inno3D GeForce GTX 280 1,024MB |
Inno3D GeForce GTX 260 OC 896MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2,048MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate marks | 358.42 | 347.10 | 314.57 | 283.52 | 430.67 | 373.91 |
264.78 |
| Normalised marks | 299.21 | 293.55 | 277.28 | 261.76 | 335.34 |
309.96 |
242.98 |
| Price | £340** | £315 | £275 | £245 | £345 | £260 | £217 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.88 | 0.93 | 1.01 | 1.07 | 0.97 | 1.18 | 1.12 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 60fps) at 1,920x1,200 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No (Far Cry 2) | Yes |
Yes | No (Far Cry 2, Company of Heroes) |
| Ambient temperature | 21.3°C | 20.6°C | 21.5°C | 19.7°C | 24°C | 22°C | 22.4°C |
| Idle card temperature | 44°C | 39°C | 47°C | 47°C | 73°C | 42.5°C | 78°C |
| Load temperature | 79°C | 70°C | 74°C | 70°C | 95°C | 62.5°C | 90°C |
| Ambient to load temperature delta | 57.7°C | 49.4°C | 52.5°C | 50.3°C | 71°C | 41°C | 67.6°C |
* 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.
** estimated pricing.
As an example, should a card score 120fps we treat it as 90fps as only half the frame rate above 60fps is counted for the HEXUS.bang4buck - this is the formula: (120-((120-60)/2)). Similarly, should it score 30fps, we count it as only 15fps: (30+((30-60)/2)).
HEXUS.bang4buck analysis
It's clear that the GeForce GTX 285 is an improvement over the GTX 280, and, in turn, the Inno3D OVERCLOCK is better still, but the vagaries of day-zero pricing are such that pre-overclocked GTX 285s are currently etailing for around £340, which is Radeon HD 4870 X2 money: a card which is manifestly faster over our five games - just take a look at the aggregate average frame-rates.
What that means is that the Inno3D card, whilst a decent performer, doesn't offer decent value for money when evaluating the price-to-performance metric of competing cards. It's not just Inno3D in this boat, of course, because all partners' GTX 285s are expensive. Indeed, the older GeForce GTX 280, now priced at £275, offers more bang for the buck.
Temperatures
Inno3D's card falls in line with other high-end GeForce in terms of temperatures. If anything, it runs a little toasty, given that it's on a 55nm process, but still well below the 105°C maximum temperature tolerance set by NVIDIA.
ATI's cards are even toastier if equipped with the reference heatsink, but Sapphire's in-house-designed Radeon HD 4850 X2 is cooler still.....and faster and cheaper, if a little noisier.
Overclocking
700MHz/1,476MHz/2,560MHz clocks are nothing to sniff at, yet such is the headroom available on the core and memory that we hit an overclocked (on top of OVERCLOCK) speed of 732MHz core, 1,543MHz shader, and a whopping 2,866MHz on the GDDR3 memory.
The extra speed pushed the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars performance at 1,920x1,200 from an average of 99.37fps to 104.83fps, beating the Radeon HD 4870 X2. We expect other games to benefit by at least five per cent, too.
