Gadgetory

I might have a slight addiction to graphics cards what is going on guys James - sent here bringing you another affordable graphics card review unfortunately I'm not wearing the brightly colored blue shirt that I tend to wear when I do an affordable product review because it's dirty and I don't wear dirty clothes on camera at least not that you can see I'm not talking about my pants cuz reviewers don't wear pants so recently AMD launched the r9 285 and - a lot of people including myself this card was a little bit confusing I didn't really quite understand why it existed I mean we already have the 280 and the 280 was already beating the 760 and pretty much every single test but then when you start to dig a little deeper in what the card is you start to realize it truly is a successor to the r9 280 now the reason for that is the r9 280 is pretty much a rebranded 7950 graphics card it does not GCN architecture doesn't have true audio don't have any of that stuff and that's exactly what the r9 285 is bringing to the table what I have sitting right here actually is the r9 280 from XFX now why do I even have this out here when this is actually a video about the visiontek radeon Radeon r9 285 well it's to show you how far they've actually come with the design now this right here as I mentioned is the r9 280 and as you can see there is quite the size difference between the r9 285 what if I told you the card on top is actually stronger than this card in every single way yeah that's why you take it and you pretty much just toss it aside don't worry guys no cards were actually harmed in the making of this video well with the exception of maybe the ego of the r9 280 and the GTX 760 now one of the things that makes this card actually superior to the 280 is it's not just a rebranded 7950 graphics card like v2 80 is this is a true GCN or graphics core next the architecture which AMD launched with this hawaii-based GPUs this thing's got true audio it's got HD media accelerator power play technology power tune technology zero core power Dolby true HD I think I already mentioned that AMD HD 3d technology AMD crossfire aim aim D app acceleration I affinity technology the list goes on and on yeah I'm reading the box because there's no way I could have ever said that without miss speaking we all know I'm full of miss speaks sometimes now one of the things I think is a little bit interesting though is the fact that it only has two gigabytes of gddr5 versus the three gigabytes which are actually available on the r9 280 but when it came to benchmarking this beast that actually didn't really seem to make any sort of difference so this graphics card is featuring two DVI is a DVID DVI is got dual link hdmi and displayport natively now the cooler on this thing I'll be honest with you when I saw the pictures of this I expected this to be kind of a cheap plastic u shroud that's not what you get here you get a full metal design on this it's very very sturdy in fact it doesn't flex it doesn't creak and when it's mounted because it's so short the card the card so short it doesn't droop so the card is very very sturdy and stiff now it's got true PCI Express 3.0 16x slot and it is capable of running crossfire without a crossfire bridge and that's a telltale sign of this being a hawaii-based GPU there is no crossfire bridge on there that's cool because it's actually handled through the PCI Express slot now I'm not going to talk a whole lot about the actual specs of the card you guys can find out all that information online this is a a reference based PCB but it's actually built by visiontek it is not a is not a PCB supplied by AMD it's actually they're built reference based PCB with non-reference cooler as you can see okay let's go ahead and see how the thing is actually performing when it comes to games you may be surprised because I kind of was be honest I mean after all size matters right bigger is better it's all about how big it is now I spent a lot of time with this car doing lots and lots of benchmarking and benchmarking it again and benchmarking again and again and again and she spent quite a few hours with this card because I really wanted to figure out why it exists because I'll be honest in the beginning I wasn't quite sure now I'm going to actually be referencing my notes here because again I don't want to mess up any of these numbers my goodness alright so the vision Tec r9 285 has a base clock of 945 megahertz now it because it has its built-in overclocking technology sort of like the GPU boost that nvidia is using it can dynamically control the clock all the way up to 1077 megahertz when it comes to auto overclocking now I used MSI Afterburner and I checked the extended overclocking features where it will allow me to take the card well beyond what is actually deemed safe because I like to see how much these cards really have in them so the benchmarks that you are about to see are at the eleven hundred and fifty megahertz core and fifteen hundred megahertz memory November that's 1,500 times four or six gigahertz effective memory clock speed so 1150 and 6,000 that is a pretty good overclock if you ask me especially considering we went about another 74 megahertz above where they actually felt that we should stop alright now I ran kind of a gambit of tests and here's my methodology in case you guys are wondering I for battlefield 4 guys I have to say right now mantle 14.4 or whatever it is we're on I remember the exact whatever the latest driver is I went and updated and downloaded that for Battlefield 4 I'm going to tell you right now the frames per second averages were about seven FPS higher than what you're about to see but the only way I can actually measure frames per second and benchmark them is by using the direct eleven driver so if you're using mantle which is available to you you should be using it you're going to get a few more FPS average that's kind of a big deal make sure you're doing that but these tests I'm showing you are with DirectX 11 just want to put that out there before people start saying yeah you didn't use that although I did but then for the benchmarking because all the other tests I did with other graphics cards it's such word the DX 11 that's what we use for this test all right now the max temperatures with this cooler it's very very quiet it actually never went higher than about 50% on the fans and with the stock max overclocked the max temperature was 65 degrees Celsius and that's a few degrees hotter than they advertised but then again I live in the desert and it gets really really hot here in fact it was 105 degrees Fahrenheit today I know those places that are hotter guys I'm not bragging about the heat trust me it chances are the 4 or 5 degrees hotter than they showed in their testing is entirely due to ambient temperature remember it is an air cooled card now the max temperatures with my overclock all the way up to 1150 actually reached 74 degrees Celsius now that's not very hot but it's also not as cold as they advertised but it still was very manageable in terms of temperatures so it just goes to show you push this card even farther way farther than what they recommend in terms of overclocking and the cooler can still handle it with lots of headroom so kudos visiontek on that one that's a very beefy cooler that you've got there all right so now when it comes to valley benchmark i was actually getting a 1652 score with the extreme HD that's actually what's running behind me right here now what's interesting about that that's actually lower than my 280 and my 760 scored so I don't know what's up with that but that's the only test that it was beaten out by those two cards I'm gonna take Valley with a grain of salt it's been acting very very weird lately in fact when I went to a 3-way SLI system I get a lower score than I did with two-way so valleys just finicky I'm going to throw that test out the window now 3d marked fire strike I was getting a seven thousand seven hundred and thirty nine in the non extreme test I didn't run the extreme test but the non extreme test seven thousand seven hundred thirty-nine which is actually up there with the 280x in terms of performance through mark 1111 thousand five hundred seventy seven total score and that's what the 4770k which I've been using for my test bench for quite a while now that beat out my GTX 680 that beat out the 280 it beat out the two of the 760 overclocked that eleven thousand 577 that is a massive score all right now battlefield 4 we were getting an average frames per second of 65 frames per second now here's the way that I come up with this test remember DirectX 11 for this test we were actually seeing well over 70 FPS averages based on what I was watching the counter do with mantle going but because mantle is not a DirectX API the frames per second counters can't detect the frames when mantle is being used that's why I have to use the x11 to do apples-to-apples comparisons now when it comes to my tip my test ology or methodology I will run the fraps benchmark for 60 seconds and I do it 10 times per match and then I play another match it's partial storm 64 player I play another match I do another 10 60 second runs and then I do it for a third time and then I'll take the averages of the averages if that makes any sense well average those 10 get a number average the next 10 get a number so I end up with 3 numbers I'm gonna take the average of the three that's how I get my overall frames per second averages that's my methodology it's probably different than everyone else's just take that for what it is so battlefield 4 was 65 frames per second average now tomb raider tomb raider i went ahead and put this at the the extreme preset or all truckin or what they call it but the highest preset with you know tessellated tessellation going and tress effects and all that stuff we were at getting a 72 frames per second average at 1080p with everything maxed out it was very playable no choppy no choppiness whatsoever actually had a good time playing in fact I've kind of forgot that I was doing the bench test and I kind of kept playing and I was like oh yeah I forgot I never beat this game and I kind of got into it so I played that one for about an hour turning all this bench testing dirt3 an average of 129 frames per second with all settings maxed out at 1080p that was 10 frames per second higher than I was actually getting with the r9 280 so this card is a freaking beast now why does it exist pretty simple guys but all the GCN architecture all the true audio everything you would expect on the GCN architecture graphics core next aim these latest and greatest when it comes to technologies all crammed into this tiny tiny little card it I like giant long cards and this thing is just burst in my bubble with bigger and longer is better and it comes in at two hundred and fifty dollars and it's given you all this types of these types of performance now there's another reason why you guys should really consider this particular card is it has a lifetime warranty there's only two companies on the market that are doing that XFX and vision tech guys I stand by their products you can't argue with the warranty I rarely ever talk about warranty but that's because it's rarely ever worth talking about but a lifetime warranty is a big deal now this card is only available directly through vision Tech's so you guys are going to have to head over to their website they only do business right now in the United States they are based out of the Chicago area so you guys are dealing with a us-based company here in the United States all their tech support all our warranty stuff it's all handled in the US so I'll put a link down to their storefront you guys can go and check out their card there it was certainly worth taking a look at small package huge performance that's what she said guys follow on Twitter I'm gonna go ahead and get the heck on out of here the r9 285 pretty damn cool all these cards are just turning everything topsy-turvy see you in the next