HEXUS.bang4buck, power-draw, overclocking, Blu-ray
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,280x1,024 frame-rates for the five 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 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 4670 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB | XFX GeForce 9600 GT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate marks at 1,280x1,024 | 261.62 |
195.2 |
295.28 |
| Normalised marks at 1,280x1,024 | 236.68 |
142.81 |
277.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £76 | £62 | £84 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,280x1,024 | 3.11 |
2.30 |
3.3 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 60fps) at 1,280x1,024 | No (FC2, CoD, CoH GRID) | No (FC2, CoD, CoH GRID) | No (FC2, CoD, CoH GRID) |
| Blu-ray playback (The Dark Knight) CPU load | 18 | 20 | 24 |
| Power-draw idle (platform) | 98W |
92W |
117W |
| Power-draw load (platform) | 172W |
156W |
188W |
| Ambient temps | 22.2°C |
23.6°C | 21.5°C |
| Idle temps | 32°C | 32°C | 34°C |
| Load temps | 54°C | 52°C | 45°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 31.8°C | 28.4°C | 23.5°C |
Because three cards were run across all five games, only those have been included in the table, above. The other two, GeForce 9400 GT and Radeon HD 4550, produce pitiful numbers in comparison, hence their exclusion for a second reason.
The venerable GeForce 9600 GT, now price-ravaged repeatedly since launch, does best in the HEXUS.bang4buck metric, just beating out the Sapphire HD 4670 512MB GDDR4.
We also note something that's quite important in today's world that, rightly, is focused on energy efficiency. The HD 4650 draws some 16W less than the pre-overclockd HD 4670. Doesn't sound like much, does it, but assume that you use the PC, under load, for 40 hours a week - Folding, for example - and the latter uses around £5 worth of extra juice, or £20 if left on 24/7 Multiply that by a lot of machines and you get the picture.
Overclocking
Cranking it up, we squeezed the HD 4670 GDDR4 frequencies from a stock of 750/750/2,200MHz to 800/800/2,300MHz, whilst the HD 4650 GDDR3 climbed from 600/600/1,400 to 635/635/1,610.
Looking back at the numbers, the HD 4670, run at 1,680x1,050 in ET:QW, rose from an average 51.3fps to 54.03fps. On the same benchmark, the HD 4650 scaled from 36.95fps to 41.43fps, helped mostly by the significant memory increase.
