Gadgetory

the AMD r9 280 launch was a confusing one at the time because to the informed eye it was obvious that what AMD had done was create a lot of fanfare with a Hawaii launch event for what was other than the r9 290 and 290 X which both featured newly designed silicon basically an exercise in taking existing card designs and giving them a shiny new name that means the current 200 series is actually a mix of old and new hardware designs it's fine from a performance standpoint as long as the pricing makes sense but it can lead to confusion even at that launch event andy talks a lot about trueaudio a feature that up until now has only been supported on the r9 260 x and r9 290 series and then again at CES this year they showed off free sync a dynamic refresh rate technology similar to gsync to reduce screen tearing but since revealed that that also only works on part of their current lineup because of this mix of old and new technology so with that out of the way onto the card we're introducing today the r9 285 based on noon codenamed Tonga silicon might not be earth-shattering from a performance standpoint but what it does aside from delivering great power efficiency is bring the 250 dollar price point in line with high-end enthusiast cards from a feature standpoint with improved mantle support along with support for true audio bridgeless crossfire updated power tune dynamic performance optimization and finally free sync with the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor SSD or nook you could instantly win and Intel gaming Jersey and be entered in the draw for the ultimate system click now to learn more now when I said the card wasn't going to deliver groundbreaking performance I probably wasn't telling the very clever among you anything you didn't already know when we look at its specs compared to the r9 280 whose price point it pretty much replaces it features the same number of coarse texture and render output units it has a slightly lower clock speed it has a narrower 256-bit memory bus with 33% less memory overall so that's 2 gigs of DDR 5 then it has a slightly higher memory clock to compensate for some of those other deficiencies and it features a 5 percent lower TDP meaning that heat output will be reduced of course though with GPUs it's never about comparing specs head-to-head directly and AMD has made some tweaks under the hood that will improve tessellation performance compute performance and memory performance that they hope will make up for some of these spec deficiencies on top of that AMD has added a couple of multimedia features including automatic configuration of the speakers in your I finna t monitor or TV setup as left mid and right channels along with hardware h.264 4k and code and decode support that will significantly reduce power consumption when playing back 4k content this is a feature that even the new Hawaii r9 290 Series GPUs don't have AMD's engineers have been busy now AMD didn't send us a reference card so let's take a minute to appreciate the specifics of the gigabyte windforce Edition card that we have received like all gigabyte windforce graphics cards it features an open airflow non-reference windforce branded cooler that enough wind force for you this one features a dual heat pipe and aluminum thin design that did a great job of keeping the 285 cool in our testing it's got two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort it's got dual 100 millimeter fins it's got reversed PCI Express power connectors which is actually quite nice for cable management a PCI Express 16 X slot on the bottom and no bridge connector at the top is needed thanks to the XDM a cross fire support in the Tonga GPU but you don't just want to watch me stare at this GPU thing for seven minutes do you no no you want to know about the performance well here it is take it away Luke alright guys remember how it used to sound like a zombie all the time well I'm back first of all none of these cards are actually overclocked a large number of you guys have been asking us to run our benchmarks not overclocked for some time now and we've decided to see how it goes there's also been a platform change we have swapped out our old platform for a new Asus x99 deluxe motherboard a 59 30 K running at stock and 16 gigabytes of g.skill memory also running at a stock speed of 20 133 megahertz due to a horrible naming scheme it can be a little bit confusing figuring out where the r9 285 lands in AMD's product stack to try to show where the card falls in the general graphics card landscape we decided to benchmark it against the gtx 760 which should be fairly similar in both price and performance then I threw it against a gtx 750ti and an r9 290 in order to represent some other fairly common price points as well AMD fans will be happy to hear that the r9 285 performed admirably in the games that I tested in beating out the gtx 760 intuitive three tests and proving its worth in its price bracket to be honest though this is pretty much exactly what was expected of this graphics card as the graphics card game has been pretty easy to predict as of late well that's it for zombie voice back to you - so there you have it folks it performs about as expected but here's something you might not have expected AMD is refreshing their never settle game bundle program now it's space edition and this one qualifies for the gold level so you can pick up - any three of the 29 games available check it out for gamers buying graphics cards an appealing game that they were planning to pick up anyway can be a very compelling value add so its conclusion time you get a DirectX 12 GPU that's feature complete compared to the rest of AMD's lineup and performs about like you'd expect an AMD GPU that cost 250 bucks to perform hard to go wrong not the most stunning or exciting conclusion ever but this isn't the most stunning or exciting card ever either not that being a trusty workhorse is a bad thing it sold a lot of r9 to 80s for AMD and it'll do the same with the r9 285 thanks for watching guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you just liked it leave a comment letting me know what you thought of the video if you have suggestions for future videos check out the video description will you find a link to support us you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy new socks thanks for watching again and as always don't forget to subscribe