HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the card's bang per buck, we've aggregated the average 1280x1024 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.| Card | Foxconn GeForce 7600 GT 256MiB | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS 256MiB | HIS Radeon X1650 XT OC 256MiB | Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 256MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate marks at 1280x1024 | 155.58 | 231.70 | 177.57 | 253.91 |
| Price | £93 | £110 | £100 | £120 |
| Acceptable framerate at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF | Just | Yes | Just | Yes |
The chart above represents aggregate marks divided by the price. It highlights two points. The first is that the HEXUS.bang4buck metric for the Foxconn GeForce 7600 GT is in the vicinity of the competing HIS Radeon X1650 XT card. More importantly, perhaps, it also illustrates that spending more money - say £20-£30 - will buy performance that is exponentially higher than the increase in price. In short, and evaluated in pure performance terms, our advice would be to stretch your budget to a GeForce 7900 GS or Radeon X1950 Pro.
Overclocking
The Foxconn FV-N76TM2D2 is shipped with reference-like frequencies of 560MHz core and 1400MHz memory. We managed to bump up those clocks to 667MHz/1592MHz with excellent stability. Of course, your mileage will vary and the results obtained from our sample aren't necessarily indicative of what you will achieve. With that disclaimer out of the way, we re-ran our Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark at 1600x1200 0x AA 8x AF with HDR, to see what kind of impact the extra speed made on gaming performance.
A worthwhile increase, we suppose, but no amount of air-cooled overclocking will bring the performance to default GeForce 7900 GS levels - and that's the problem when pricing is similar.
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