HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the card's bang per buck, we've aggregated the average 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF framerates for the three games and listed the cards' current price. There are more provisos than I care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen three different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from different sources, and pricing is such that it can fluctuate daily. However, to reiterate, the graph below highlights a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural or incidental benefits are not covered, obviously, and GeForce 8800 GTS is all about architectural benefits.| Card | ASUS EN8800GTS/HTDP/640M 640MiB | Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-OD 768MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GiB | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512MiB | ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate FPS at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | 229.49 | 317.22 | 283.14 | 197.42 | 229.9 |
| Average Street Price | £275 | £400 | £290 | £240 | £245 |
| Acceptable framerate at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The HEXUS.bang4buck simply divides aggregated FPS by price, to give you a rough idea of comparative value. It's interesting to see that NVIDIA's own GeForce 7950 GX2 and ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX come out on top, but that's as much reliant on pure price-chopping as any other factor. What the graph does show is that there are no stinkers when evaluated by the price-to-performance metric. Also, expect the GeForce 8800 GTS' metric to rise in relation to previous generation cards' when newer, more strenuous gaming engines are implemented.
Overclocking
We managed to overclock our sample card from its default 513/1600 clocking to 610/1752, which is a 19% and 9.5% gain, respectively, over base frequencies. The core overclock, in particular, was impressive. As a guide to how that affects performance we re-ran the 1920x1200 HDR Splinter Cell test.
A 15% gain in performance isn't bad, but it's still far behind the default-clocked GeForce 8800 GTX.
