HEXUS.bang4buck, HEXUS.bang4watt, and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 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 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.
| Graphics cards | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | ASUS GeForce GTX 465 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 SLI 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SC SLI 768MB | KFA2 GeForce GTX 460 LTD OC 1,024MB | POV TGT GeForce GTX 460 768MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB | EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 XF 1,024MB | HIS Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1080 | 380.1 | 306.47 | 246.59 | 455.1 | 449.8 | 295.8 | 268.5 | 251.3 | 234.16 | 445.42 | 300.27 | 263.97 | 211.02 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,080 | 316.95 | 252.48 | 188.24 | 371.55 | 366.8 | 243.0 | 212.65 | 196.03 | 174.84 | 372.31 | 263.56 | 223.09 | 156.5 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £360 | £230 | £190 | £360 | £360 | £202 | £191 | £180 | £165 | £440 | £320 | £220 | £160 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.880 | 1.052 | 0.991 | 1.032 | 1.019 | 1.203 | 1.113 | 1.089 | 1.060 | 0.846 | 0.824 |
1.014 | 0.978 |
| Peak power consumption | 389 | 346 | 333 | 390 | 375 | 323 | 301 | 289 | 270 | 400 | 297 | 270 | 273 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt** score at 1,920x1,080 | 0.815 | 0.730 | 0.565 | 0.953 | 0.978 | 0.752 | 0.706 | 0.678 | 0.648 | 0.931 | 0.887 | 0.826 | 0.573 |
* 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. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Crysis Warhead.
Evaluation
Add up the aggregate scores, across the five games, at 1,920x1,080 and the POV TGT's performance falls just below the Radeon HD 5850's. The same is largely true for normalised performance, but the HD 5850 steals a march by having more consistent results (no huge scores in COD, for example).
The obvious downside of a super-high-clocked GTX 460 is the price, at £191. Even with this taken into account, the POV TGT returns the second-highest HEXUS.bang4buck in this large line-up.
Overclocking
But how much higher can it go, folks? We managed to hoist frequencies to from 824MHz/4,020MHz to 889MHz core and 4,360MHz, offering further insight into the potential of the GF104 die.
Rerunning the 1,920x1,080 numbers on our five games and comparing them with the regular Ultra Charged frequencies, frame-rates were boosted by, on average, 6.9 per cent.
