Sapphire Dual-X AMD R9 285 “Tonga” 2GB Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing (accurate at the time of writing)

AMD’s R9 285 costs $249.99 MSRP, which is the same as the MSRP for the R9 280 and GTX 760. Although the R9 280 can be found at retailers from $210 and the GTX 760 from $225. Sapphire’s model will cost the same as the MSRP, $250, and comes with a 2 year warranty.

UPDATE: This product is now priced at £169.99 at Overclockers UK.

Summary 

The R9 285 Tonga Pro graphics card is certainly an interesting new release from AMD. Firstly, the name is quite confusing, despite being seemingly higher than the R9 280 and R9 280X it performs on par with the R9 280 and has less memory than both. AMD were obviously in a problematic place when it comes to naming because had they opted for R9 275 and R9 275X (for Tonga XT) they would end up with the R9 275X being faster than the R9 280, the current way is still awkward because the R9 285 is slower than the R9 280X and it remains to be seen how the R9 285X will perform. Naming confusion aside the performance is good: for a card that was clocked slower than our R9 280 and with less memory and a smaller memory bus: it still performed better. That shows AMD have done great things with optimising the performance of the R9 285, they’ve also done that while managing to reduce power consumption which is an impressive achievement considering this is still a 28nm GCN based graphics card. My only concern is that there is a $40 premium over the R9 280 which does for all intents and purposes perform broadly the same: I’m not sure most gamers would care enough about power consumption and performance efficiency to spend that extra $40, especially as on paper 2GB versus 3GB seems less impressive.

What Sapphire have done with the card is equally as impressive. The Dual-X cooling solution showed itself to be a great cooling performer and very quiet under all load scenarios. It sure isn’t whisper silent under Furmark load but under realistic gaming loads it won’t be audible inside a decent case. Sapphire’s Dual-X is well respected for a reason. The black PCB is also a nice touch and as always Sapphire’s pricing is competitive so there really are no complaints here: Sapphire have done a sterling job!

Pros

• Improved power efficiency – allows for more compact form factor
• Extra performance seems to have come from nowhere!?
• Priced competitively
• Beats Nvidia’s equivalent – should force price cuts

Cons

• R9 280 performs similarly for less cost
• 2GB of RAM is a downgrade from 3GB on R9 280

“The R9 285 is a step in the right direction for AMD’s graphics division, it shows innovation, refinement and progress can be made from an existing architecture. It may not be the best bang-for-buck offering AMD have ever produced but it’s still a cracking graphics card that outpaces the competition at the same price.”

Thank you to AMD for providing this review sample.