At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R9 285 IceQ X2 OC 2GB GDDR5 Video Card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About HIS:

 

“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.

HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.

In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.

Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”

Product Features:

 

Features of R9 285

 

GCN Architecture

 

Primed to enable astonishing performance and breathtaking image quality, making it a top choice for gamers who expect the best.

 

In simple terms, increasing the number of transistors in a GPU has a big impact on the potential performance of a graphics card, but transistors alone are not enough. It takes a truly great design, like the GCN Architecture, to effectively use that potential and turn it into real-world performance.

 

Mantle and DirectX 12

 

Cutaway showing the inner layers of the earth

 

There’s optimization, and then there’s Mantle. Mantle gives game developers the power to speak directly to the GPU core. With such a direct connection to your hardware, game developers are discovering a whole new world of immersion and performance made possible by AMD graphics leadership. Games enabled with Mantle speak the language of GCN architecture to unlock revolutionary performance and image quality.

 

AMD Eyefinity technology

 

Enjoy the ultimate immersive gaming experience with innovative “wrap around” multi-display capabilities. Take your PC games to the next level of reality and immersion. Most modern games look great on three screens, and only AMD Radeon™ graphics offer you the ability to play across five screens for an eye-popping gaming experience. Other combinations and configurations with up to six screens work too. Create your dream display.

 

AMD PowerTune technology

 

Enables intelligent power monitoring to enable higher clock speeds and better performance in your favorite games.

 

AMD TrueAudio technology

 

By leveraging AMD TrueAudio technology, game developers now have the ability to recreate acoustic environments with incredible fidelity, and to bring them to every gamer. With AMD technology inside all the most popular “next-generation” gaming platforms, including the PC, gamers across the entire industry will finally enjoy the best audio today’s technology can offer.

With the sonic brilliance of AMD TrueAudio technology, your games now sound as good as they look. You get the most revolutionary, realistic and breathtaking sound we’ve ever put in a GPU.

 

AMD Freesync technology

 

FreeSync does not need to poll or wait on the display in order to determine when it’s safe to send the next frame to the monitor. FreeSync uses industry-standard DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync protocols to pre-negotiate supported min/max refresh rates during plug’n’play, which means frame presentation to the user will never be delayed or impaired by time-consuming two-way handshakes.

 

IceQ X² – Cooler, Quieter

 

Cooler

With IceQ X², the card is cooler than the reference cooler.

 

Quieter

IceQ X² is one of the quietest coolers, making the card quieter than the reference cooler. The card is below 28dB when watching movies, surfing Facebook and working. The card remains quiet whether you are gaming, online socializing, entertaining or working.

 

Fan Design

 

The super large 2x 86mm dual axial fans draws massive amount of cool air to cool the GPU directly.

The Q&C fan blade increases air velocity make cooling more efficiently while keeping noise level at minimum.

The fan is extremely durable with a life span of up to 70,000 hours.

The 5x 6mm wide heatpipes optimize cooling performance by removing heat from the core area.

The extra-large 60 x 62 mm copper heatsink provides a large area to dissipate heat efficiently.

The card also carries memory and MOSFET heat sinks to provide extra heat dissipation from these areas.

The card also features fan control and monitoring, you are able to read fan speed & ASIC temperature from iTurbo or other software.

 

Built for Crossfire

 

CrossFireX Ready!

The card's is armed with Crossfire Connector, ready for CrossFire & strengthened performance!

 

iTurbo - Your Graphics Card’s Assistant

 

iTurbo is your graphics card’s assistant to control your card to be quiet, cool. Experience overclocking by simply pressing the iTurbo Button!

 

User Friendly Overclocking Software: Cooler, Quieter, OC!

 

iTurbo's Fan Control and Fan Monitoring allow easy adjustment of your card to its maximum cooling performance or to run your card quietly!

 

Press iTurbo: OC Right Away!

 

With the smart auto overclocking function, users can experience a slight performance boost for selected HIS graphic cards with just one click!

Powerful Overclocking Software

Either you wish to unleash its full potential or to make it more environmental friendly, iTurbo is ready for you!

 

iTurbo is compatible with all cards! Enjoy OC no matter what card you have!

 

Product Specifications:

 

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:

 

 

 

The 90mm dual axial fans have 11 blades and in the middle HIS has placed an iTurbo sticker:

 

 

 

An IceQ X2 logo is to be found on the top left side:

 

 

 

The opposite corner is occupied with an OC logo, telling us that we are dealing with a pre-overclocked card from the factory:

 

 

 

The lateral shots are showing the complexity of the cooling system for the HIS R9 285 OC:

 

 

 

 

On the back side of the PCB we will be able to spot some factory stickers, along with the GPU back plate:

 

 

 

The heatsink is noticeably longer than the PCB:

 

 

 

The R9 285 needs extra juice from two 6-pin PCI-Express connectors; nearby we have the 4-pin fan connector which supplies power to both fans:

 

 

 

As outputs, we will see one DLDVI-I, one DLDVI-D, one DisplayPort but also one HDMI:

 

 

 

 

In order to get access to the frontal part of the PCB, we will have to remove the cooling system; the four spring-loaded screws are attached to the GPU back plate:

 

 

 

The HIS R9 285 comes with the VRM section in the left side of the PCB, while the memory modules can be seen around the GPU:

 

 

 

As we have seen with the Gigabyte card, the VRM section 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 cooling system is composed from five 6mm wide heat pipes which optimize the cooling performance by removing the heat from the core area:

 

 

 

Test Setup

 

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

 

With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.9 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

 

 

To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

 

 

From the HIS website, we can download the iTurbo video card utility, which is very handy for customizing the fan speeds, monitoring several parameters or performing overclocking. The interface is user-friendly and presents itself like a wheel console, in its minimized mode:

 

 

The UI can open up in a larger form, in order to expose the full-sized interface. The menus can be accessed on top of the applications and these include Home, Info, Overclock and so on. In the Home tab we can find more news regarding the manufacturer, the ongoing promotions or the latest drivers:

 

 

 

The Info tab will display various hardware information regarding the card like card name, GPU series name, die size, memory size, bus width, ROPs and so on:

 

 

 

The Overclock tab comes with adjustments for the GPU Clock, Memory Clock, Board Power Limit (also present in CCC), but also VDDC. These modifications can be saved by assigning them to different profiles or we can simply jump to the factory defaults:

 

 

 

The Fan Control tab allows customizing the curve in manual mode or setting a fixed value:

 

 

 

The final tab, Settings, lets us adjust some of the global options like Load on Startup, Show memory clocks, Disable 2D clocks and so on:

 

 

Temperature tests:

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 the 2560x1440 (system) resolution for an additional 40 to 50 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 21.5 degrees Celsius:

 

 

Noise measurements

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 28.9 dBA (with everything turned off).

At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.

The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the HIS iTurbo utility:

 

 

 

3DMark 2003

[pts]

3DMark Vantage

[pts]

3DMark 11

[pts]

3DMark 2013

[pts]

Unigine Heaven 4.0

[FPS/pts]

Aliens vs Predator

[FPS]

Hitman Absolution

[FPS]

DIRT 3

[FPS]

Sleeping Dogs

[FPS]

Stalker: COP

[FPS]

Tomb Raider

[FPS]

Final Fantasy XIV –Maximum Preset

[FPS]

Crysis 2 – Ultra Preset

[FPS]

Bioshock Infinite – Ultra DDOF Preset

[FPS]

Resident Evil 6

[pts]

Batman Arhkam City GOTY

[FPS]

METRO 2033

[FPS]

DIRT Showdown

[FPS]

F1 2013

[FPS]

Metro: Last Light

[FPS]

 

GRID 2

[FPS]

 

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. This explains the situation that the R9 285 is able to keep up with the R9 280 despite the shrinked memory bus and a lower quantity of onboard memory.

 

The new GPU also comes with GCN 1.2 which brings improvements when discussing about image and video processing; we can speak about a new version video-decode block, which was also known previously as UVD (Unified Video Decoder). The new decoder fully supports 4K H.264 video up to 4Kp60; this helps quite a bit since the card does not need to offload new tasks to the CPU.

 

The HIS R9 285 IceQ X2 2GB OC video card is overclocked from the factory but not as high as the Gigabyte R9 285 OC so the overall results were a bit lower inside our benchmarks and games. However, we could overclock the card quite a bit with the supplied utility and have reached similar performance in the end:

 

 

 

The card is available online for about 209 Euros, noticeable lower than the Gigabyte model which can be bought for about 225 Euros. The overclocking capabilities are similar only that the Gigabyte variant is a little bit more silent while in full-load.

 HIS R9 285 IceQ X2 OC 2GB GDDR5 Video Card is Recommended For:

 

 

We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!