HEXUS.bang4buck, and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for five games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table, 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.
| Graphics cards | Inno3D GeForce GTX 275 OC 896MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB | ASUS GeForce GTX 260 MATRIX 896MB | BFG
GeForce GTX 260 896MB |
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC 1,024MB | ASUS Radeon HD 4890 VT 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 385.48 | 364.28 | 326.77 | 320.56 | 371.73 | 354.02 | 318.63 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 341.46 |
328.52 |
303.73 |
299.52 |
334.17 |
322.78 |
291.71 |
| Current price, including VAT | £220 | £199 |
£185 (TBC) | £155 | £198 | £201 |
£160 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 1.552 |
1.651 | 1.642 | 1.933 | 1.688 |
1.606 |
1.823 |
* 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.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.Analysis
Performing in close proximity to a default-clocked '260 once the optimised profile is selected, the ASUS GeForce GTX 260 MATRIX's HEXUS.bang4buck isn't quite as impressive, should it come in at £185. The card's iTracker software and hardware-monitoring ASIC don't pay dividends here.
The ASUS Radeon HD 4890 VT performs a little better but costs more. What's hurting these £180-plus cards is the bargain-basement pricing of Radeon HD 4870s and GTX 260s. No stinkers here, clearly, but neither ASUS card offers outstanding value from a performance point of view.
Overclocking
| Graphics cards | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB |
ASUS GeForce GTX 260 MATRIX 896MB | ASUS Radeon HD 4890 VT 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU clock |
633 | 576 | 850 |
| GPU max | 721 | 756 | 986 |
| Percentage overclock | 13.9 |
31.25 |
16 |
| Memory clock | 2,268 | 1,998 |
3,900 |
| Memory max |
2,564 |
2,484 | 4,680 |
| Percentage overclock | 13.05 | 24.3 |
20 |
| ET: QW 1,920x1,200 | 88.5 | 78.7 |
79.45 |
| Overclock score | 99.53 | 96.17 | 90.26 |
| Percentage increase | 12.46 | 22.2 |
13.6 |
Chucking in a £199 GeForce GTX 275 card into the overclocking mix, we see that both ASUS cards are excellent overclockers, especially the MATRIX that runs way, way past specification. We wonder why the company didn't choose to debut the card at 650MHz core and 2,200MHz memory.
