Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X 2GB Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]Conclusion

So the latest £/performance AMD card, the R9 285 has been on the test bench and we are thankful to Sapphire for sending us a sample to have a blast with; it’s been a surprising pleasure but not without its drawbacks; it wouldn’t be a review without a mixture of both good and bad points.  The R9 285 is an interesting concept and a fairly brave manifestation for AMD as the card is priced around the 280x; this is of course an AMD 7970 rebrand effectively.  The 280x does have 1GB of VRAM over the R9 285 which of course will make a difference when gaming at higher resolutions and of course it has more shader cores; this is vital in performance but not the bee all and end all of what makes a card “great”.

In no detriment to Sapphire whatsoever here, but the R9 285 asks more questions than it answers really in terms of performance; yes it is a sub £200 card and it does offer decent performance but it just lacks something.  The R9 285 across quite a few of the benchmarks traded blows very well and in a lot of cases beating the NVIDIA GTX 770; while this is admirable it is worth noting the GTX 770 is an end of line graphics card and it feels like AMD are still trying to play catch up which is never an appealing notion.  In technical terms, the R9 285 is a very good card for those who don’t mind turning the settings down a notch too high to get frame rates of over 60fps consistently but at ultra-settings, the R9 285 doesn’t quite have the grunt; unless you don’t mind playing top games below 60fps of course.

Overclocking performance was decent with an increase on the core of around 27%; nearly an increase of a third of the clock speed is nothing to be sniffed at but this can also be attributed to the cards lack of a factory overclock out of the box.  The performance when overclocked was noble I must admit but I do feel that this card is just too similar to the R9 280x and a price drop to sub £200 levels would have made much more sense; the R9 285 just makes me feel like I have been cheated a little, hard to explain but it’s just how I feel.

Design wise, Sapphire have done an excellent job of equipping the card with their Dual-X cooler which kept temperatures down to good levels but it must be noted that this cooler is LOUD.  When the fans ramped up to 50% when set to auto, I genuinely thought the card was spinning at 100% and then some; this is probably the most disappointing factor here for me but overall, if you don’t mind a hotter running card, you could notch it down to 25% etc. and go with the flow.

For £185 the Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X offers pretty decent value especially if you have a budget constraints as it does perform fairly well and I would consider any GPU under £200 more of a budget to mid ranged sort of graphics card; £200 should certainly get you a good enough GPU to run games at maximum or close to at 1080p for sure.  I am still however not convinced that the R9 285 was a good idea and would have thought (I have said before) that it would have been cheaper as the recent price drops to the R9 280x cards (some cheaper than this model in a few instances) would have made much more sense.

Although the R9 285 had potential to be another notch in the AMD v NVIDIA pound for performance title belt, it failed to deliver today and with the noisy Dual-X cooler from Sapphire, I would surely opt for a R9 280x over the R9 285; I do however like the fact Sapphire have done their best with what has been an arduous task of turning coal into gold; they did this with the R9 290 as in my opinion, they have the best versions of the AMD flagship cards on the market.  Overall and to sum the review up, the R9 285 is a good card albeit with a slightly higher price than it should be and if AMD do issue price drops on the range, I can see it being a highly formidable card but it would have been nice to see a higher VRAM capacity as R9 280x cards come with 3GB as standard and a 4GB R9 285 model will fetch a higher premium.

Huge thanks to Sapphire for sending the R9 285 Dual-X in for review and I look forward to seeing more in the future!