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 | Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 ATOMIC 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC 1,024MB | XFX Radeon HD 4890 XT 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2,048MB | Inno3D GTX 275 OC 896MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB | BFG
GeForce GTX 260 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 397.32 | 371.73 | 354.02 | 318.63 | 441.69 | 385.48 | 364.28 | 320.56 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 348.67 | 334.17 | 322.78 | 291.71 | 370.84 | 341.46 | 328.52 | 299.52 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £250? | £198 |
£190 | £165 | £239 |
£220 | £199 | £155 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.392 |
1.688 | 1.699 |
1.768 |
1.552 | 1.552 |
1.651 | 1.932 |
* 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
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 ATOMIC is significantly faster than the default-clocked XFX and pre-overclocked Sapphire OC+ HD 4890s, and that's shown by the higher aggregate and normalised scores. The downside of looking at just price - £250 for the ATOMIC - is manifested in the lowest HEXUS.bang4buck score out of the eight cards.
What this means is that you can get nearly the same level of performance for significantly less money, but that's missing the point of the better-than-reference cooler and bundle, really.
Overclocking
The core's already at a heady frequency so we didn't expect much more. Our overclocking testing, which tends to be conservative, concluded with some interesting numbers. Remember that the card ships with 1,000MHz engine and 4,200MHz memory frequencies, but we managed to ramp these up to 1,020MHz core and a whopping 4,920MHz memory - the highest we've ever seen.
Rerunning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, which returned an average 88.25fps at the shipping clocks, overclocked performance rose to 91.87fps, hinting that this particular benchmark is far more partial to a core overclock.
