HEXUS.bang4buck, and overclocking
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 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 | eVGA
GeForce GTS 250 SC 1,024MB |
XFX GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X 512MB | XFX
Radeon HD
4850 XXX 512MB |
Sapphire
Radeon HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 263.46 | 254.44 | 244.91 | 256.02 | 310.72 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 245.19 | 231.51 | 215.95 | 229.93 |
280.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £144.60 |
£109.23 | £139.99
(estimated) |
£124.99 | £143.74 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.696 | 2.119 | 1.543 | 1.84 | 1.952 |
* 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.
A keen street price ensures that the XFX Radeon HD 4850 XXX 512MB competes well in the value metric. Benchmarking at around the same level as a GeForce 9800 GTX+ (ahem, GeForce GTS 250 512MB), the slightly dearer price brings the score down to below 2. However, the value proposition is strong enough for it to be recommended on this basis alone.
Overclocking
Shipping with stock frequencies of 625/625/1,986MHz, we cranked the card up to a reasonable 702MHz core/shader and 2,234MHz, falling some way behid the impressive 760MHz core/shader and 2,384MHz memory clocks posted by the XFX Radeon HD 4850 XXX 512MB. Rerunning ET: QW at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, scoring an average 54.4fps at stock speeds, performance rose to 61.4fps.
