HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
Ina rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,680x1,050 frame-rates for three 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 three 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 1,680x1,050
| Graphics cards | Inno3D
GeForce GT 220 (1,024MB, GDDR3) |
Sapphire
Radeon HD 4670 (512MB, GDDR3) |
Sapphire
Radeon HD 4650 (512MB, GDDR3) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,680x1,080 | 212.49 | 263.64 | 180.11 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,680x1,050 | 165.78 | 207.76 | 148.32 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £53 | £53 | £43.27 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,680x1,050 | 3.13 | 3.92 | 3.43 |
* 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 Radeon HD 4670 performs better and costs about the same, so it's no surprise to see a higher HEXUS.bang4buck rating.
Overclocking
The refinements of a 40nm process bring with it decent overclocking headroom. We were able to easily push Inno3D's stock frequencies of 625MHz, 1,360MHz and 1,580MHz for GPU, shaders and memory, up to 763MHz, 1,660MHz and 1,896MHz, respectively.
The numbers suggest that NVIDIA's reference clocks are conservative, and factory-overclocked models are already filtering through to retail.
With our modest bump in speed, we witnessed a performance increase of roughly five per cent.
