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 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 | MSI Radeon HD 5770 HAWX 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 1,024MB | Inno3D GeForce GTX 260 OC 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 165.38 | 162.28 |
172.05 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 134.49 |
130.26 |
147.63 |
| Current price, including VAT | £155 | £125 | £140 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.868 | 1.042 | 1.054 |
* 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.
EvaluationAs shipped, the MSI HAWK's minor clock-speed bump leads to a minimal performance increase over the cheaper Sapphire card. This is why its HEXUS.bang4buck isn't as sharp. But you probably won't be keeping the card at 875MHz/4,800MHz...
Overclocking
Previously noted in the bundle section, we hit stable frequencies of 1,020MHz core and 5,600MHz memory once the GPU's voltage was dialled up to 1.35V, representing significant increases over the default 875MHz/4,800MHz clocking.
Far Cry 2 performance rose from 50.06fps at 1,920x1,200 to 56.79fps, whilst DiRT 2's same-resolution results jumped from 50.6fps to 56.16fps. Both represent a handy >10 per cent increase.
