VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-10-06
The R9 285 WindForce OC video card from Gigabyte impresses with the new GCN 1.2 technology improvements, a lower TDP and a solid cooling system which keeps the GPU cool even during stressful long gaming sessions. Despite the fact that the card possesses a shrinked memory BUS, it is able to trade punches with the R9 280 and in many case exceeds its performances, positioning itself just under the R9 280X.
At first we would like to thank Gigabyte Taiwan for offering a sample of their AMD Radeon R9 285 WindForce OC video card for testing and reviewing.
“GIGABYTE was founded in 1986, establishing our uncontested position in continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted motherboard leader in the globe. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we have offered a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Slate Devices, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Mobile Phones. We are dedicated to building up a full-range digital life, responding promptly and sonorously to consumer needs and desires.”
WINDFORCE 2X Anti-turbulence Inclined fin
WINDFORCE 2X parallel-inclined fin design is equipped with 2 ultra PWM fans and two copper heat pipes to enlarge air channel on the graphics card vents and creates more effective airflow system in chassis.
OC GURU ll
Brand-new instinctive user interface, easier to monitoring and adjusting all important settings. Users can set up MONITORING, GPU CLOCK, MEMORY CLOCK,FAN, OSD, ONLINE SUPPORT and update driver, BIOS directly.
Ultra Durable VGA™
Lower GPU Temperature
Ultra Durable VGA board provides dramatic cooling effect on lowering both GPU and memory temperature by doubling the copper inner layer of PCB.
Better Overclocking Capability
Ultra Durable VGA board reduces voltage ripples in normal and transient state, thus effectively lowers noises and ensures higher overclocking capability.
Decrease Power Switching Loss
Ultra Durable VGA board allows more bandwidth for electron passage and reduces circuit impedance. The less circuit impedance, the more stable flow of current and can effectively improve power efficiency.
Just before Nvidias’ move with their latest Maxwell-based GTX 970 and GTX 980, AMD has released into the wild a new GPU with the Tonga code name and the cards have 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 Gigabyte R9 285 OC features an increased GPU frequency, from 918MHz to 973MHz, while the memory was left at default so it is running at 1375MHz.
The product is shipped inside a medium-sized cardboard enclosure, with the iconic logo and Gigabyte likes to remind us that we are dealing with a custom cooler solution and that this is an overclocked model:
On the back side of the box we will be able to spot some of the main product features:
After lifting the top cover we will be able to spot the card, which sits between several layers of cardboard and for extra protection it is also wrapped inside an anti-static bag:
If we do not have the necessary PSU connectivity options, Gigabyte has us covered, by including PCI-Express to Molex adapters; we are also offered one disk with drivers and also the Quick Installation Guide:
The Gigabyte R9 285 OC video card is fitted with the WindForce 2X with two ultra-PWM fans for increasing the cooling effectiveness; as it can be clearly seen, the cooling system exceeds the PCB width by a little bit:
In the middle we will be able to spot the WindForce logo:
If we look on the sides, we will be able to spot the plastic top shroud which surrounds the fans, but also the large heatsink which covers the PCB completely:
The card needs more juice from two additional PCI-Express 6-pin headers:
On the back side of the card we will be able to spot some identification stickers, along with the spring-loaded screws which keep the cooling system in place:
The R9 285 OC is equipped with one DVI-I, one DVI-D, one HDMI but also one DisplayPort:
In order to access the top side of the PCB, we will have to remove the spring-loaded screws around the GPU area:
The PCB has quite a compact design and its length is noticeably smaller when compared to the 280; also, we can see that the main VRM component has been switched to the left side. On the GPU core we can see plenty of thermal compound, since the cooling system is based on the heatpipe direct-contact technology:
The GPU VRM is covered by a small aluminum heatsink:
Nearby we will be able to spot the ON Semiconductor NCP81022, which is able to regulate the voltage for both GPU and memory:
The Tonga AMD R9 285 GPU is manufactured on the TSMC 28nm process:
This card is equipped with 8 ELPIDA W2032BBBG-6A-F GDDR5 memory chips which are specified to run at 1500MHz:
The rest of the VRM section can be found on the right side of the GPU:
Both fans are powered from the 3-pin header which is located on the lower right area:
A quick look at the back side of the cooler reveals the two heatpipes which travel from one side to another and the memory chips use two large thermal pads as the contact interface:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: Currently reviewed card
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
To find out extra information regarding the R9 285, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
The latest version of the OC GURU II overclocking utility can be downloaded from the manufacturers’ website and from the main interface we can fine-tune the clocks for both GPU and memory, increase the voltages, set custom fan curves and more:
The Monitoring section can be opened in a more advanced way, which shows live graphs of the current GPU Clock, Memory Clock, GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage, current Fan Speed or GPU Temperature:
In order to create new fan profiles, we will have to access the respective section and draw a graph:
The location of the OSD can be modified, along with the hot key, the Screenshot hot key and some screen settings:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 30 to 40 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 24.1 degrees Celsius.
Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.3dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by OC Guru II, but we were not able to record the RPM values for each step:
Despite the shrinked memory BUS and lower memory buffer, the R9 285 OC from Gigabyte was able to trade punches with our pre-overclocked HIS 280 sample card and in many cases it has positioned itself between the R9 280 and the R9 280X. Specifications-wise one would expect to see lower than R9 280 performances but this was not the case; this is thanks to the new form of compression for frame buffer color data which reduces the amount of memory bandwidth required for frame buffer operations.
GCN 1.2 also brings improvements when discussing about image and video processing: AMD has now a new version video decode block which we knew as UVD (Unified Video Decoder). The new decoder fully supports 4K H.264 video up to 4Kp60; this helps a lot since the card does not need to offload the task to our CPU.
The Gigabyte card is also quite overclockable as we have seen when testing against artifacts with the help of the 3DMark11 benchmark tool:
The Gigabyte R9 285 WF OC has also proven a cool card during full-load stress-testing and the noise of the fans did remain at good levels.
The card is available online for about 230 Euros; considering that we can find pre-overclocked R9 280 cards at the 190 Euro level and the R9 280X is available for about 245 Euros, some people may steer in some cases to the cheaper variant so if the price will drop a bit more, this product will be a very interesting deal.
We would like to thank again to Gigabyte Taiwan for making this review possible!