Review: Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC (28nm Tonga)

Conclusion

AMD is bringing consistency to the enthusiast and premium Radeon GPUs by introducing a £170 card equipped with the latest GCN v2 technology. That card is the Tonga-powered Radeon R9 285 and it uses a scaled-down version of the Hawaii architecture to hit a more reasonable price point.

Though looking a little weaker in terms of on-paper performance than the GPU it is now going to replace, Radeon R9 280, the enhanced geometry/tessellation and memory-bandwidth optimisations mean that it punches above its supposed weight. Performance at 1080p is very competent - often with ultra-quality settings run at 60fps - and passable at 4K.

Radeon R9 285 reduces the framebuffer size to 2GB, though, through some clever compression technology, this has no discernible impact even when run at taxing 4K settings, where memory footprint is likely to be a constraining factor. More importantly for AMD, the Tonga GPU is faster than the price-comparable GeForce GTX 760 in the bulk of our benchmarks.

The arrival of any new GPU tends to put value into question. AMD says Radeon R9 285 cards are to ship today from a wide range of partners. We expect pricing to hover between £170-190 for retail cards clocked in at various levels, but the end-of-life nature of the outgoing Radeon R9 280, a comparable GPU in terms of performance, is currently underscored by a £150 asking price.

AMD, then, is making a sideways move in the upper-mainstream market. The Tonga-powered Radeon R9 285 performs and costs about the same as the Radeon R9 280 it replaces, but improves upon it by baking in a new media-processing block, True Audio support and, to a lesser degree, software CrossFire. For £170 you receive excellent 1080p performance from a GPU that's faster than the competition from Nvidia.

The Sapphire card, meanwhile, carries on the good work ploughed by the Dual-X cooler. Overclocked on both core and memory and attracting just a £10 premium over standard cards, it's a good bet if your budget is on the south side of £200. Recommended.

The Good

Greater efficiency from Tonga architecture
More performance than GeForce GTX 760
Excellent performance at 1080p, passable at 4K
True Audio and software CrossFire support
Competitive pricing

The Bad

Sideways performance move from R9 280
R9 280 available for less (for now)

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Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC 2GB

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The Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X OC 2GB graphics card is available to purchase from Scan.co.uk.*

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