HEXUS.bang4buck and overclocking
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 and 2,560x1,600 frame-rates for five games, excluding card-bashing Crysis, 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 tables, below, highlight 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 at 1,920x1,200
* 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
Summarising what's been shown in the benchmarks, the mid-range 5-series cards' performance, whilst undeniably decent, isn't quite as good as the price-ravaged Radeon HD 4870. Any card scoring a HEXUS.bang4buck metric of over 2 can be thought of as providing value, but this notion should be tempered by also looking at the average fps achieved when taking the six games into account.
Purchases of modern cards should be based on more than just pixel-pushing performance, we feel, and we'll tie it all up in the conclusion.
Overclocking
Our Radeon HD 5770 sample stubbornly refused to overclock any higher than the 850MHz core. Memory speed fared much better, rising from 4,800MHz to 5,620MHz. The additional headroom gave an extra 4.4 per cent performance across the games.
Radeon HD 5750's overclocking was better, jumping from 700MHz/4,600MHz to 770MHz/5,700MHz, leading to an 11.6 per cent increase across the games.
