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 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 | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | BFG
GeForce GTX 260 896MB |
eVGA GeForce GTS 250 Superclocked 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB | Sapphire
Radeon HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 409.15 | 326.75 | 263.46 | 320.17 | 318.63 | 310.72 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 352.25 | 301.27 | 245.19 | 292.04 |
291.71 | 280.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £299 | £160 | £144.60 | £220 (estimated) | £165 |
£143.72 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.178 |
1.883 | 1.696 | 1.327 | 1.768 | 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, of course.Analysis
There's scant improvement over a Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB card, when evaluated at 1,920x1,200, hence the considerably lower HEXUS.bang4buck score. The metric doesn't take the cooler into account, of course, but the asking price of £220 seems rather too high when evaluated on performance alone.
Overclocking
Cranking it up from 750MHz core/shader and 3,600MHz memory, we managed to hit a steady 813MHz core and an effective 4,300MHz GDDR5 speed. The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark at 1,920x1,200 increased from an average 71.5fps to 75.07fps - a five per cent rise.
