HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame rates for three new and three old games, normalised them and taken account of listed the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd 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 tends to fluctuate daily.
Consequently, the table and graph 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.
| Graphics cards | ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1024MiB | ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MiB | ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT 512MiB AMP! Edition | MSI NX8800GTS-T2D512E-OC | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1920x1200 | 173.66 | 107.04 | 153.55 | 165.44 | 156.75 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1920x1200 | 129 | 82.76 | 118.16 | 124.07 | 124.04 |
| Current price | £279 | £149 | £189 | £209 | £235 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1920x1200 | 0.462 | 0.555 | 0.625 | 0.594 | 0.528 |
| Acceptable frame rate (av. 60fps) at 1920x1200 | No (ET, LP) | No (CoH, ET, LP) | No (ET, LP) | No (ET, LP) | No (ET, LP) |
Here are those HEXUS.bang4buck scores in graph form.
Radeon HD 3870 X2 1024MiB performance is, on balance, the best on test so why the low-ish HEXUS.bang4buck score? The simple answer is that whilst it is the fastest card, albeit only marginally, the £279 asking price is significantly higher than the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS 512s. Putting it another way, those cards are close enough in performance but are cheaper. You can also add a second and run SLI right now, without having to wait for a supporting driver.
Interestingly, the X2 edges the 8800 GTX on our old suite.
