[section_title title=”Introduction”]Introduction
Brand: Sapphire
Model: R9 285 Dual-X 2GB
RRP: £185.38 (At time of review)
Although Sapphire Technology don’t have the air miles of some current brands (MSI, ASUS), they have carved out their own lineage with some pretty huge accomplishments; first graphics card with HDMI and first 1GHz clocked graphics card. With that being said, Sapphire Technology was formed in 2001 within the Hong Kong district; a meagre decade and a bit ago which is mightily impressive given their catalogue of products.
Now one kicker here is that Sapphire only currently produce cards for the red team (AMD/Radeon) which is of course no bad thing; AMD GPU’s have been striding leaps and bounds and keeping NVIDIA on their toes for years but with the battle for £/performance raging deep into the night, it’s time to see what AMD has up their never ending sleeve.
Enter the AMD R9 285 graphics card, released to inflict damage on NVIDIA’s release of the GTX 760, AMD’s purpose was to give consumers and gamers alike performance which will not only play highly demanding games, but come in at a price which will make it affordable for those even with budget restraints; in this case sub £200. Of course DirectX 12 support and Mantle API are featured with the R9 285 as well as support for the latest 4K resolutions, but what’s today’s R9 285 got that the R9 280/280x hasn’t already given us? I intend to find out…
So on the Play3r test bench today, we have the Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X graphics card with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM over a 256-bit bus with effective speeds of 5500MHz. Add the 28nm chip clocked at 918MHz with 1792 stream processes and we have a pretty interesting review ahead of us; the main difference with the 285 and the 280 is that the 280 has slightly more memory bandwidth so it will be interesting to see how that comes into play.
On with the review and let’s see if Sapphires R9 285 can show me why AMD is known for being king of value, but first, let’s take a look at the technical specifications…
