Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The Radeon R9 285 is a fun little addition towards the 280 line-up, we can't label the release however with a tag like spectacular. I mean the 280 and 280X are already very close to each other in terms of performance, and this card sits in the middle of the two. We've seen this performance with the 7900 series, we have seen it with the 280 series and now the 285 is roughly at the very same marker as well. AMD markets this as a WQHD gaming card, that would be a monitor resolution of 2560x1440, personally I'd rather call it an excellent Full HD (1920x1080/1200) card, WHQD not so much though. See WQHD will be a notch too stringent with high image quality settings and the most modern heavy on the GPU games. Next to that 2 GB of graphics memory is just a too small number for that resolution in this era of PC gaming. Now if we filter away gaming for a second, then Tonga shows some nice improvements to be found with UHD 4K video playback, and we did notice that H.264 encoding is roughly 2x faster than on Tahiti. Both features obviously require proper software to utilize it. Very interesting to see the decrease in power consumption, the card under full load eats roughly 190 Watts and that is roughly 40 watts less then say the 280X / 7970 while retaining roughly the same performance. That makes the graphics card consume way less power, despite this still being a 28nm product. So in that respect it is certainly impressive what AMD managed to do there.

Overall

When you look at the Radeon R9-285 overall, performance, Eyefinity features, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we like these cards belong in the mainstream to high-end (and certainly not enthusiast) graphics card arena. We dislike the fact that AMD dropped from 3GB towards 2 GB. Especially when you market the product as a 2560x1440 graphics card then the 2 GB is just too marginal with the latest games in that resolution. Overall we think the R9 285 will be a very nice Full HD gaming card, WHQD is possible but you'll find yourself un-ticking graphics quality options pretty fast to gain on framerate performance and to lower graphics memory utilization.

Cooling and Noise levels

This product is cooling fairly well. Now we did not receive a reference product, instead the received the Strix edition from ASUS. You can expect roughly 70~75 Degrees C or lower under heavy GPU load in a proper ventilated PC with this specific model. Directly related to the cooling are the noise levels, we have no complaints here. This is a relatively very silent card.

Power Consumption 

The board is rated at a 190 Watt TDP, that means when you completely stress it, that's the power consumption. Our measurements showed that the board TDP is indeed roughly 190 Watts. This is reasonable for this kind of performance especially when you take into account that the product is factory overclocked for you (albeit a tiny bit). 

Overclocking

Overclocking then, we see average results with our ASUS board, we could set the card at 1020 MHz but did not have voltage control just yet. 1050 MHz stability caved in pretty fast. The memory reached 6 Gbps which is nice, but here again anything substantial high results into crashes. Maybe our card was not the best batch as we find the OC results a bit average.

Final Words

Contrary what AMD claims, we would not really recommend the Radeon R9 285 as a product in the 2560x1440 space. You are far better off with the 'old' Radeon HD 7970 or the respin R9 280X which has 3GB graphics memory on a much faster memory bus. A nice plus for the 285 of course is the improved 190 Watt TDP, whilst being very impressive fact we doubt that is the decisive factor in your purchasing habits. Next to improved power consumption the UHD 4K video playback and perf improvements for video encoding are of course much welcomed. So yes, any game will play at a resolution of 1080P perfectly fine with proper image quality settings. 2560x1440 is in reach, but the GPU lacks the raw power for the perf savvy games, and the 2 GB graphics memory is simply not a good move in that WHQD resolution anno 2014. Overall for 250 USD / 239 EUR incl VAT the Radeon R9 285 offers decent performance for the money. Oh and hey, you'll receive free games from the Never Settle bundle from which you can choose from as well. This is an R9 card meaning you get to pick 3 free titles from a total of 29 games - realistically this is a good deal. But we can't trawl away from the fact that in the past three years everybody probably already purchased a 7900 or 280 series card. So as an upgrade with only 2 GB memory, this product is going to be a somewhat difficult sell. But for a Full HD gamer coming from the 7800 series, this product at 250 USD could make a lot of sense.

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