HEXUS.bang4buck and HEXUS.bang4watt
Ina rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang for 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 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.
Again, please bear in mind that we've manually overclocked the card. Two figures are shown for the Inno3D Hawk - the first relates to out-of-the-box performance and the second to the numbers obtained once overclocked.1,920x1,200
| Graphics cards | HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB | ASUS Radeon HD 5870 MATRIX 2,048MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 480 AMP! 1,536MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB | Inno3D GeForce GTX 470 Hawk 1,280MB | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 470 1,280MB | ASUS GeForce GTX 465 1,024MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,920x1,200 | 387.66 | 286.85 | 278.78 | 242.71 | 356.55 | 339.28 | 328.04 (274.15 default) | 272.06 | 221.41 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,920x1,200 | 315.65 | 239.84 |
234.86 |
197.97 |
278.7 |
265.64 |
257.63 (212.55) | 211.31 | 157.86 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £550 | £400 | £325 | £235 | £450 | £400 | £330 | £300 | £235 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,920x1,200 | 0.574 |
0.6 |
0.723 |
0.842 |
0.619 |
0.664 |
0.781 (0.644) | 0.704 |
0.672 |
| HEXUS.bang4watt score at 1,920x1,200** | 0.818 |
0.738 |
0.815 |
0.761 |
0.686 | 0.667 |
0.691 (0.616) | 0.614 |
0.495 |
* 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.bang4watt score is a crude measurement of how much normalised performance the GPU provides when evaluated against peak system-wide power-draw that's shown on the previous page: the former is divided by the latter. We're using the peak power-draw numbers obtained by running real-world Battlefield: BC2.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course. As we're using Aliens vs. Predator and DiRT 2 DX11 as two of the games here the GTX 295 and GTX 285 are omitted.
