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HIS R9 285 IceQ X2 OC 2GB GDDR5 Video Card Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-11-04

As the R9 285 OC model from Gigabyte, the HIS R9 285 IceQ X2 2GB OC video card is based on the Tonga architecture and is using a new form of compression for frame buffer color data, which reduces the amount of memory bandwidth required for buffer operations. The product is overclocked from the factory but not as high as the Gigabyte R9 285 OC so the overall results were a bit lower in the synthetic benchmarks but also inside the games. However, we could overclock the card quite a bit with the supplied utility and have reached similar performance when the card was maxed-out.

Packaging, A Closer Look

In this review article we will take a look at another AMD video card which sports the new GPU with the Tonga code name, while the video card has received the R9 285 naming. Despite the numbering scheme, the number of shader cores, texture units and ROPs is identical to the Tahiti R9 280 GPU but the memory bus has been shrinked from 384-bit to 256-bit and the onboard memory is now 2GB instead of 3GB. At the default memory frequencies, the memory bandwidth has been lowered from 240GB/s to 176GB/s.

Besides those mentioned, the card is built on the newer GCN 1.2 architecture, has a much lower TDP versus the R9 280 (190W), supports AMD TrueAudio which was only available with the R7 260, 260X and R9 290, 290X cards; one more important thing to mention is that the card does not need a CrossFire finger for operating in multiple cards configurations.

GCN 1.2 instruction set includes an improved compute task scheduling, new 16-bit floating point and integer instructions for low-power GPU compute and media processing but also data parallel processing instructions (sharing between SIMD lanes). Tessellation has noticeable improvements, with Tonga being able to trail Hawaii GPU at low tessellation factors and bringing unexpected performance increase over Tahiti at x64 factor.

Considering the lower bus width, AMD had to increase the efficiency in some way and they did this with color compression: the frame buffer color data is stored in a lossless compressed format. This reduces the amount of memory bandwidth required for frame buffer operations.

If we study the latest AMD slides, it seems that they are aiming on completely discontinuing the R9 280 and replacing it with the R9 285 which is cheaper to produce.

The HIS R9 285 IceQ X2 OC video card features an increased GPU frequency, from 918MHz to 938MHz, while the memory was left at default so it is running at 1375MHz.

The usual box-art is also present on the latest release from HIS and on the frontal part we can see the main product features represented with small icons:

If we need more details regarding these, we can easily check out the back side of the enclosure:

On one of the sides, the manufacturer has placed the list of system requirements:

Also here we will get to see the list of box contents:

After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a black box, which features a HIS logo in the middle:

Over the protective foam, we will be able to spot the usual HIS envelope along with a small leaflet with installation instructions:

Inside the envelope we will get the documentation, along with the driver disk and also one HIS sticker:

Besides the thick foam material, HIS has also wrapped the card inside an anti-static bag:

The card sports a cooler design we have seen before with the 280/280X cards, which has proven quite efficient and includes a dual-fan solution:

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