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.
HEXUS.bang4buck at 1,920x1,200
HEXUS.bang4buck at 2,560x1,600
* 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 actual and normalised
numbers are currently some of the lowest we've seen
from any graphics card to date - this is due to the inflated launch-day pricing of AMD's latest graphics card. Having had a brief look around, we've found pricing of in-stock cards to be around the £539 mark - way above the recommended £425 etail price.
Overclocking
With our talk on how the card
is geared towards overclocking, we
managed to hit stable, overclocked frequencies of 875MHz core and
4,700MHz memory, up from the default 725MHz/4,000MHz. Our benchmarks
numbers indicate that, on average, the extra speed provides a 14 per
cent increase in performance.
We'll be taking a much closer look at HD 5970 overclocking as we
evaluate Sapphire's card.
