[section_title title=”Overclocking”]
Overclocking
The R9 285 including the Sapphire Dual-X version have default clock speeds of 918MHz which technically means this sample doesn’t have a factory overclock out of the box; does this mean overclocking potential is going to be high? Well I hoped so as AMD cards have been pretty good for churning out decent numbers since the introduction of their R9 series.
The 285 should theoretically fill the gap between the R9 280 and R9 290 but coming close to a R9 290 for the price might be a tall order to match, nevertheless overclocking allows for things like this to happen and provided you have decent enough airflow and of course a power supply capable enough of handling the extra power draw; the jobs a good-un.
For overclocking this particular sample I used MSI Afterburner and although this sample wasn’t the best example of a good overclocker, I did manage to obtain clocks of 1170/1570MHz fully stable. I could hit 1200MHz on the core but some benchmarks would crash this such as Heaven/Valley so in the fairness of testing, we only use a 100% stable overclock for any testing etc.
As you can see, even when overclocked the Sapphire R9 285 fails to give fully playable frame rates on Battlefield 4 when set to Ultra, even at 1080p; I would have expected a little bit more and with the known issues and bad experiences I have had with the Mantle API, this didn’t add justification to the lack of grunt.
The card when overclocked did however perform well in 3DMark with a nice jump over the more expensive R9 280X; not a bad thing and overall, I would have liked to have seen better overclocking potential but who knows, other samples might have better luck as silicone lottery can play a huge part in this portion of the testing.
