HEXUS.bang4buck, and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for 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 tables, 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.
HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,920x1,200
| Graphics cards | Sapphire
Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1,024MB |
Sapphire Radeon
HD 5870 1,024MB |
Sapphire Radeon
HD 5850 1,024MB |
Sapphire Radeon
HD 4890 OC 1,024MB |
BFG
GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB |
BFG GeForce GTX
285 1,024MB |
XFX GeForce GTX
275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 532.09 | 524.80 | 439.41 | 393.90 | 578.90 | 404.15 | 377.17 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 416.05 | 412.4 |
369.73 | 345.66 | 439.45 | 342.71 | 325.25 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £330 |
£300 |
£200 | £150 | £350 | £240 | £165 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.261 | 1.38 | 1.849 |
2.304 |
1.256 |
1.428 | 1.971 |
* 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 reasoning behind the comparatively poor HEXUS.bang4buck is two-fold. Firstly, the 10 per cent price premium over the generic card is reflected by benchmark performance that is, on average, 2.9 per cent better. Secondly, the high price of the very best-performing cards is always unattractive when compared to the next rung down, which are often a direct derivation of the headline design.
Overclocking
Cranking it up some, we hit a stable, overclocked speed of 962MHz core and 5,224MHz memory. The increase, on the core in particular, would suggest that Sapphire's been conservative with the shipping clocks, although it's always a case of weighing up speeds vs. yields. Your mileage will vary, of course.
Compared to stock, the extra speed pushed average performance up by 7.1 per cent.
