Efficiency, Price, And Performance Value

Our previous page showed that added performance generally requires added power, though the performance differences were far greater than power differences. Let’s see how the overclocked cards compare to the reference-clocked card by way of efficiency.

Overclocking improves efficiency by allowing much more “work” to be done at similar power levels. The most likely reason for Palit’s huge lead is a reliance on GPU voltage that’s similar to Nvidia’s reference design voltage.

Jetway drops out of the retail price chart for two reasons: First, its sample is non-retail. Second, even if Jetway had sent its retail KN460EW1GV-A, a lack of availability in the U.S. market would prevent us from assigning a Web price to the chart. We hope to see Jetway graphics products reach U.S. vendors in the near future.

Ignoring added-value items like extended warranties and in-box games gives us a simplified value chart above. Of course, that chart will be meaningless to overclockers, as GPU temperature is a better metric for judging how far they might be able to push these cards.

That is to say, we’re not willing to completely dismiss added value, especially when it comes to warranties and support. So, which card would we pick?