Review: ASUS GeForce GTX 465 - Fermi for under £250

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 four 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 four 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.

1,920x1,200

2,560x1,600

* 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 DiRT 2 DX11 as one of the games here the GTX 295 and GTX 285 are omitted.

Evaluation

Cumulative and normalised performance at 1,920x1,200 is around 15 per cent lower than on the Radeon HD 5850. This is why the HEXUS.bang4buck score is also a commensurate amount lower. The rudimentary HEXUS.bang4watt is even lower, due to a higher-power draw.

Overclocking