HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,680x1,050 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 1,680x1,050
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB | Sapphire
Radeon HD 5670 1,024MB |
Inno3D GeForce GT 240 512MB | BFG
GeForce GT 220 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,680x1,050 | 183.69 | 210.08 |
249.8 | 217.32 | 139.84 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,680x1,050 | 125.53 | 165.11 | 224.7 | 175.97 | 59.77 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £65 | £53 | £79 | £76 | £54 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,680x1,050 | 1.931 | 3.115 |
2.844 |
2.315 |
1.107 |
* 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. This will be updated with a new revision which covers non-3D performance in the very near future.
EvaluationNormalised performance is shy of a Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce GT 240's, leading to a HEXUS.bang4buck metric which, with price taken into account, is lower than both. The HD 5570 is far from a bad card, but the £65 etail price doesn't do it any favours.
