Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC Video Card Review

AMD recently announced their Radeon R9 285 graphics card, this was their first major graphics card announcement since the R9 295X2 back in April. Looking at the naming of the card we expect it to be a replacement for the R9 280, but is it really? It has the same number of shaders, TMUs, and ROPs as the R9 280, but has a narrower memory bus at 256bit (vs 364bit of R9 280X) and less VRAM (2 GB vs 3 GB), although that memory is clocked higher (5.5 GHz vs 5.0 GHz). Looking at the specifications you may be wondering what what is the point? Well unlike the R9 280 which is built on AMD’s Tahiti silicon, the R9 285 is built on the brand new Tonga silicon. While it is still based on the same 28 nm process Tonga is said to be more efficient and also adds many of the features that we saw on the Hawaii silicon like XDMA CrossFire (no more CrossFire connectors), TrueAudio DSP, and the ability to connect 4 displays using all output connectors on the card. Today we are taking a look at Sapphire’s Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC version of the card. It will feature a slight overclock on the core clock (965 MHz vs 918 MHz) and the memory (1400 MHz vs 1375 MHz). It will also have Sapphire’s Dual-X cooling solution which seems to be extremely quiet. Let’s jump in and see what this card can do.

Special thanks to Sapphire for providing us with the Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC Video Card to review.

Specifications
Display Support: 4 x Maximum Display Monitor(s) support
Output:
– 1 x HDMI (with 3D)
– 1 x DisplayPort 1.2
– 1 x Dual-Link DVI-D
– 1 x Dual-Link DVI-I
GPU:
– 965 MHz Core Clock
– 28 nm Chip
– 1792 x Stream Processors
Video Memory:
– 2048 MB Size
– 256 -bit GDDR5
– 5600 MHz Effective
Dimension:
– 264(L)X113(W)X34(H) mm Size.
– 2 x slot
Accessory:
– DVI to VGA Adapter
– 6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable x 2
– HDMI 1.4a high speed 1.8 meter cable(Full Retail SKU only)

Packaging
The Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-OC video card comes in Sapphire’s typical retail packaging. The front of the box lets us know some of the main features of the card.

Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC

The back of the box goes into detail on all of these features.

Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC

Opening the box up you will find the R9 285 Dual-X OC video card, HDMI cable, DVI to VGA adapter, 2x 6pin PCI-Express to molex connectors, mousepad, quick installation guide, and driver and utility CD.

Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC

For a full unboxing of the video card be sure to check out our video below.

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