Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 HAWK Edition 3GB graphics card review

HEXUS.bang4buck and bang4watt

Putting all the numbers into perspective, let's take a closer look at overall performance and value for money.

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,080 frame-rates for six games, normalised them¹ and taken account of today's pricing.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen six different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new-release GPUs.

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.

¹ 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.

² the GPU power consumption is derived from subtracting a flat rate of 100W - indicating system power-draw without a card - from the Call of Duty: Black Ops load figure. While this figure isn't solely indicative of power pulled by the GPU, as the CPU also throttles up, it's a better metric than using peak system-draw alone.

³ the HEXUS.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against GPU power-draw that's shown in the table: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Just Cause 2.

Summary

When taking into account performance at 2,560x1,600 and 1,920x1,080, the 3GB HAWK Edition card doesn't score favourably in our bank4buck analysis.

This particular metric doesn't take into account cooling performance, noise or overclockability, but it does point out the obvious - at these resolutions, a standard 1.5GB GTX 580 offers roughly the same level of performance at a lower price.