HEXUS.bang4buck, HEXUS.bang4watt, plus 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 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 460 768MB | KFA GeForce GTS 450 LTD OC 1,024MB | ASUS GeForce GTS TOP 450 1,024MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1,024MB SLI | NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1,024MB | HIS Radeon HD 5770 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 1,024MB XF | Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,680x1050 | 328.7 | 259.2 | 265.6 | 396 | 231.9 | 259.7 | 368.2 | 226.4 | 168.7 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,680x1050 | 280.15 | 219.9 |
227.2 |
329.9 | 186.25 |
225.85 |
316.1 |
183.5 |
109.05 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £130 | £102 | £115 | £198 | £99 | £115 |
£210 |
£105 | £85 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,680x1050 | 2.155 | 2.156 |
1.976 |
1.666 |
1.881 |
1.964 |
1.505 |
1.748 |
1.283 |
| Crysis peak power consumption | 204 | 206 | 208 | 272 | 181 | 163 | 225 | 155 | 126 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt** score at 1,680x1050 | 1.373 | 1.067 |
1.092 |
1.213 |
1.029 |
1.386 |
1.405 |
1.184 |
0.865 |
* 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
The low street price and benefits arising from significant overclocking pay dividends for KFA2; it produces the highest HEXUS.bang4buck score in this line-up. In effect, KFA2 provides you with between 10-15 per cent extra performance over a default card but without the large premium usually associated with heavily-clocked models.While the HEXUS.bang4buck is undeniably good, the same praise cannot be levelled against the HEXUS.bang4watt metric, which is compromised by system-wide power-draw that's 25 per cent higher than the performance-comparable Radeon HD 5770.
