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 | Inno3D GeForce GTX 275 896MB | Inno3D
GeForce GTX 260 FreezerX2 896MB |
XFX Radeon HD 4890 1,024MB | XFX Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB | XFX Radeon HD 4870 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 X2 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 364.28 | 320.56 | 354.02 | 318.63 | 317.5 |
445.06 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 328.52 |
299.52 | 322.78 |
291.73 |
290.76 |
367.56 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £199 | £138 | £183 | £137 |
£123 | £157 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.651 | 2.170 | 1.764 |
2.129 |
2.364 |
2.341 |
* 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
We commented that the introduction of the GeForce GTX 275 make the overpriced GTX 285 practically redundant. Taken at a resolution of 1,920x1,200, over the five games, GTX 275 and HD 4890 do well enough, providing closely-matching HEXUS.bang4buck scores. What's telling is how much better value the GeForce GTX 260 and HD 4870 provide. The normalised frame-rates are close enough to the '275 and '4890, but pricing is much, much keener.
The Inno3D card scores over '2' in the high-end HEXUS.bang4buck metric, which is excellent, but it's beaten out by the £125 HD 4870. The CrossFireX HD 4770s do rather well, too.
Looking back over the game results at 1,680x1,050 and 1,920x1,200, a £138 custom-cooled GTX 260 makes a lot of sense.
Overclocking
Knowing that Inno3D plays the game safe by shipping the card at default frequencies and with due knowledge that the custom HSF appears to be better than the regular model, overclocking results were always going to be interesting.
We managed to crank the card up to 707MHz core, 1,550MHz shaders, and 2,436MHz memory - a healthy boost on all fronts. However, the overclock is in line with a bunch of other GTX 260s cooled by the reference heatsink.
Rerunning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, which returned an average 76.5fps at the shipping clocks, overclocked performance rose to 92.7fps, representing a figure higher than the GTX 275's score.
