HEXUS.bang4buck, overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for four 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 four 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 | BFG GeForce GTX OCX 285 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 216.59 | 244.94 |
230.07 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 188.8 | 206.88 |
196.95 |
| Current price, including VAT | £285 | £262 | £225 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.662 | 0.790 | 0.875 |
* 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.
EvaluationThe HEXUS.bang4buck table shows that all three graphics cards put up decent performance. Sapphire's HD 5850 TOXIC costs 16 per cent more than a bone-stock card but provides 6.5 per cent extra performance at 1,920x1,200. This means that its HEXUS.bang4buck is lower, of course, although the number excludes any acknowledgement that the TOXIC has a better cooler.
Overclocking
Cranking up the frequencies, we reached a maximum 830MHz core and 4,750MHz memory. These represent clocks that are lower than a standard Radeon HD 5870's (850/4,800) even without taking the extra 160 SPs into account. Taken as an average over our games, the boosted clocks provided an extra 5.9 per cent on top of already-overclocked TOXIC scores.
