HEXUS.bang4buck, and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 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 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | MSI GeForce GTX 275 Frozr 896MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1,024MB | Sapphire
Radeon HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 617.82 | 617.18 | 364.28 | 539.87 | 354.02 |
317.5 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 459.11 |
458.6 |
325.52 |
419.94 |
322.78 |
290.76 |
| Average framerate at 1,920x1,200 | 123.56 |
123.43 |
72.85 |
107.97 |
70.8 |
63.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £356.77 |
£375 | £217 | £242.27 |
£140 | £109 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.287 | 1.223 |
1.50 |
1.734 |
2.306 |
2.668 |
| Graphics cards | Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | MSI GeForce GTX 275 Frozr 896MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1,024MB | Sapphire
Radeon HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 2,560x1,600 | 431.23 | 429.64 | 258.17 |
374.98 |
235.47 |
190.5 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 2,560x1,600 | 365.62 |
364.83 |
237.26 |
333.73 |
202.77 |
135.75 |
| Average framerate at 2,560x1,600 | 86.25 |
85.93 |
51.63 |
75 |
47.09 |
38.1 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £356.77 |
£375 | £217 | £242.27 |
£140 | £109 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 2,560x1,600 | 1.025 |
0.973 |
1.093 |
1.378 |
1.448 |
1.245 |
* 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
Looking at the 1,920x1,200 results first, there's no doubt that GeForce GTX 295 is hugely fast, as it averages 123.56fps in the five games. However, even a Radeon HD 4890 1GB card averages 63.5fps and it costs less than one-third of the price. That's why the GTX 295s' HEXUS.bang4buck doesn't look good here.
Raise the evaluation to 2,560x1,600 and the only cards to break 60fps are the three twin-GPU models. The relatively cheap price for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 makes it look the best here, we reckon.
Overclocking
From the default 576/1,242/2,016MHz, we managed to crank the card up to 709MHz core, 1,518MHz shaders, and 2,484MHz memory - a decent boost on all fronts. Looking back at dual-PCB GeForce GTX 295s, the overclock is a little better than average.
Rerunning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF, which returned an average 137fps at the shipping clocks, overclocked performance rose to a blistering 159.33fps - an increase of around 16.3 per cent.
