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' 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 other 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 benefits are not covered, obviously.HEXUS.bang4buck
| Card | XFX GeForce 8800 GTX XXX Edition 768MiB | Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-OD 768MiB | ASUS EN8800GTS/HTDP/640M 640MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GiB | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512MiB | Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate FPS at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | 338.55 | 317.22 | 229.49 | 283.14 | 197.42 | 229.9 |
| Average Street Price | £460 | £375 | £252 | £300 | £240 | £225 |
| Acceptable framerate at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
And here is the metric in an easy-to-understand graph.
The graph highlights what we already suspected, that is, the price premium of the XXX Edition isn't compensated for by the equivalent increase in performance. It's the first time that it's been displaced from the top of the graph - right down to the very bottom, but the value-for-money metric won't unduly worry prospective buyers. Recent price-cutting of the Radeon X1950 XTX cards makes its metric look impressive.
Overclocking
It's mightily fast already, but just how much further can it go?We managed to increase memory speed to an effective 2120MHz but had no joy in pushing the core any higher than the specified 630MHz: that's speed-binning to perfection!
The extra memory bandwidth translates to just over an extra FPS. It's hardly worth overclocking, is it? [advert]
