Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Any Radeon R9 285 is a fun little addition towards the 280 line-up but it is a product in a very saturated product position. Both 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. Next to that the card comes with 2GB of memory whereas we really recommend 3GB at 2560x1440. For Full HD at 1920x1080 this is a pretty sweet card series at 250 SUD though. GPU wise 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. 

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

PowerColor has a very nice offering with the TurboDuo edition. not only is the product clocked faster at stock, it remains tatally silent at very low noise levels. You can expect roughly 70~75 Degrees C during gaming or 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 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 way better results then with the ASUS board we initially tested, we could set the card at 1100 MHz but did add 100Mv extra on the GPU. 1150 MHz stability caved in pretty fast. The memory reached 6.2 Gbps which is nice. overall you'll gain another 10% in performance roughly.

Final Words

We stated this in our initial review already, contrary what AMD claims we would not really target the Radeon R9 285 being a product in the 2560x1440 gaming arena. You are better off with the 'old' Radeon HD 7970 or the re-spin 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.

PowerColor on its end offers a product that is totally silent with very decent cooling levels. So you really can't complain about it at all. Next to that we tweaked another 150 MHz out of the GPU clock frequency and gave the memory another 10% in clock frequency as well. So this card is a very reasonable tweaker. PowerColor will price this card at roughly 250 USD / 239 EUR incl VAT, 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. The 2GB is a bit of a hindrance anno 2014 but at Full HD it will be enough for 95% of the games out there combined with good image quality settings. The TurboDuo is silent, factory overclocked and remains fairly cool. We like that and if you haven't upgraded for a long time, this might just be what the doctor ordered if you are on this budget level. We can wholeheartedly recommend it, but not if you already are on a series Radeon HD 7900 performance level graphics card.

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