HEXUS.bang4buck, HEXUS.bang4watt and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for 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 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.
1,920x1,200
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 TOXIC 4,096MB | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 XF 2,048MB | HIS Radeon HD 5850 XF 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 SLI 1,280MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 541.07 | 479.12 | 563.62 | 481.63 | 355.58 | 342.43 | 295.68 | 566.47 | 432.89 | 345.82 | 363.16 |
259.49 |
234.23 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 403.22 | 364.02 | 411.80 |
364.78 |
297.49 |
289.59 |
254.29 |
414.57 |
334.22 | 277.4 |
295.16 |
224.23 |
202.39 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £750? | £550 | £650 | £450 | £360 | £325 | £230 | £600 | £415 | £300 | £425 | £275 | £200 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.538 | 0.662 | 0.634 | 0.811 | 0.826 | 0.891 | 1.106 | 0.690 |
0.805 |
0.925 |
0.695 |
0.815 | 1.012 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt score at 1,920x1,200** | 0.602 | 0.793 | 0.832 | 0.812 | 0.8 | 0.905 | 0.892 |
0.779 |
0.704 |
0.806 |
0.584 |
0.598 |
0.552 |
2,560x1,600
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 TOXIC 4,096MB | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 XF 2,048MB | HIS Radeon HD 5850 XF 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 SLI 1,280MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB | BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 2,560x1,600 | 407.50 | 346.21 |
402.14 | 343.42 |
258.93 | 244.84 | 209.08 | 401.15 | 290.29 | 229.71 | 264.78 |
NA |
NA |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 2,560x1,600 | 320.62 | 284.53 |
318.77 |
288.72 |
224.47 |
216.92 |
175.2 |
311.23 |
240.53 | 199.2 |
233.2 |
NA |
NA |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £750? | £550 | £650 | £450 | £360 | £325 | £230 | £600 | £415 | £300 | £425 | £275 | £200 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 2,560x1,600 | 0.427 | 0.517 | 0.490 | 0.642 | 0.623 | 0.667 | 0.761 | 0.518 | 0.579 | 0.664 | 0.548 | NA | NA |
* 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.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against peak system-wide power-draw that's shown on the previous page: the former is divided by the latter. Bear in mind that FurMark, the application used, tends to load up NVIDIA cards a touch more than AMD's.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.
Evaluation
Our performance-per-pound proposition doesn't take into account noise and operating temperatures. However, if framerates are the only concern, Sapphire's HD 5970 TOXIC doesn't quite offer enough bang4buck. As illustrated by our tables, cheaper CrossFire/SLI configurations offer marginally better value for money.
The aggregate score at 2,560x1,600 for the Sapphire HD 5970 TOXIC is the best of the bunch, but a CrossFire configuration consisting of two reference Radeon HD 5870s is less than one per cent behind and costs £100 less.
Overclocking
Showing that the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 TOXIC 4GB is on the bleeding edge of AMD's 5000-series architecture, we found that the card had little-to-no overclocking headroom. Adding just an additional 15MHz to the GPU core was enough to cause system instability.
At this early stage, it's possible that yields will improve and Sapphire may further tweak its cooler, but we don't envisage the card offering much in terms of overclocking. As far as air cooling is concerned, Sapphire appears to have pushed AMD's Radeon HD 5970 as far as it'll go.
