Clock speed

[houdinii]

how does clock speed affect a video card and performance? like when comparing a 350 dollar card with a core clock of 850 and a 500 dollar card of the same model with 950 clock everthing else staying the same.

 

[mjsharma]

yes it does...
those are factory overclocked cards.
even if you can do overclocking but most of the people prefer factory oc ones because its guaranteed to work in that high clocks...

 

[Rustyy117]

What cards are you talking about when you say "350 dollar card with a core clock of 850 and a 500 dollar card of the same model with 950 clock everthing else staying the same."

The core clock of a card is a small percentage of what makes a card as fast as it is. There are so many other things that contribute to a cards performance, like number of ROP's, Stream Processor's, Memory bandwidth, Memory Type ETC.....

 

[houdinii]

card 1 the cheapes one on new egg and card 2

those are the 2 1gb cards i was looking at, i had some 2gb cards i was looking at but i was told with only one monitor that i would not see any performance over the 1 gb cards so i said ok 1 gb card it is.

 

[mjsharma]

thats it....card 2 extremely OCed

 

[Rustyy117]

Ok well the main 2 differences between those cards is the Gigabyte card has a much better cooler and a fairly decent overclock. Although 5870's run very cool anyway and you could overclock the XFX model to the speed of the Gigabyte model.

 

[houdinii]

the reason i ask is because if im going to spend 500 on a card it might as well be a 480 but if the cheapest 5870 is the same performance as the expensive one then y even pay that big price

 

[hang-the-9]

Card 1 is closer to 400 than 350, and the other one is not available. The price difference could be mainly brand and time it was put out (prices tend to drop over time). You won't see enough difference in framrate between them to warrant an extra $100.

 

[mjsharma]

not same performance.... clock speed matters...
that gigabyte card is gonna run faster than xfx...
but you can overclock the xfx card,,, but you can't be sure of reaching such high clocks...
but that gigabyte will overclock more and may reach 1000mhz so its even more faster