HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck we've aggregated the average 1920x1200 4xAA 8(16)xAF 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
| Graphics cards | ECS GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB (575/1800) | OCZ GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB (575/1800) | ASUS EN8800GTS/HTDP/640M 640MiB (513/1600) | NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GiB (500/1200)* | Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB (650/2000) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate FPS at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | 316.92 | 316.89 | 229.49 | 283.14 | 229.9 |
| Average Street Price | £375 | £400 | £250 | £300 | £225 |
| Acceptable framerate at 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
And here is the metric in an easy-to-understand graph.
The metric highlights the aggregated marks divided by current price, thereby giving you a yardstick to compare the cards on something other than pure FPS.
The decent performance of both GeForce 8800 GTX cards is somewhat overshadowed by the cost when evaluated this way. £375/400 doesn't buy you almost twice the performance in our high-resolution benchmarks as the Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX, for example. Even a GeForce 8800 GTS looks more favourable here, thanks to recent price cutting.
Overclocking
Carrying on the theme of both cards performing similarly, we were able to overclock the ECS sample to 633.5MHz/2032MHz and the OCZ to 635/2092. Both sets of figures are within the boundaries set by other GeForce 8800 GTX cards we've reviewed before, so no major surprises here.We then re-ran our WUXGA resolution Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark, to see what extra performance was available form the increased clock frequencies.
We know that default-clocked performance is around 86FPS. Overclocking, then, does pay dividends to the tune of almost 10 per cent extra framerate.
