A decent graphics card, but why would you buy it?
With AMD’s latest offerings to the bloodthirsty GPU gods right around the corner, it’s about time we wrapped up the last of the old breed. Compact and Mini-ITX machines have, over the last two years, become predominantly more popular as consumers lean towards cleaner, tighter rigs. This, coupled with the introduction of the Steam OS and in-home game streaming, means it’s suddenly become more appealing to build your own ITX dream machine.
As a result, GPU manufacturers have begun releasing ITX editions of their signature cards, ever since Asus led the charge and kickstarted the arms race back in 2013, with the Geforce GTX 670. But enough background. Let’s get to it.
Sapphire’s AMD R9 285 launched at the end of last year and comes with an efficient heat-pipe design consisting of a single fan on top of AMD’s power-saving architecture, Tonga. This ensures the card is only 171mm long and 110mm wide, while still retaining all the performance of the original-sized R9 285.
Although on paper the R9 285 has lower specs than that of the R9 280X, it’s still more than competitive against its older brother. This is entirely down to the way AMD has re-engineered GCN. Instead of being a simple rebrand of the R9 280’s Tahiti core, it’s in fact a condensed version of the Hawaii core found inside the R9 290X. This allows the card to utilise four times the number of asynchronous compute engines – twice the number found in the R9 280 editions – alongside a host of other features, including the lack of a need for Crossfire bridges.
So surely, with a feature-rich card at the base of Sapphire’s aftermarket solution, not a lot can go wrong here? The card performs admirably at 1080p with most modern titles, reaching 30-40fps when tessellation and other such features are turned down. What does impress is how quiet this card remains under load, quite the feat for an AMD card, though it’s far from inaudible. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t overclock as well. We managed a 10 per cent increase to the core clock and memory frequencies, but after that, it tended to become unstable. This is a single cooler card, however, so the fact it overclocks at all is impressive enough.
You’re not going to get much love if you plan on using this card to game at 1440p, certainly not with the more modern titles, though it should be more than capable of running League of Legends, Dota 2 and some of the other less graphically intensive games.
Right now, though, this card just doesn’t make sense. Finding a slot for it in the market is nigh impossible. For the same money you could grab yourself an MSI Geforce GTX 960. Alternatively, if your heart’s set on having a small form factor build, there’s the Asus 960 ITX for £10 less.
For a card that’s cooler, quieter and generally provides better performance, it’d be hard for us to choose the Sapphire over the Asus. It’d make much more sense to either purchase the 960 now or, if you’re a die hard fan of team red, wait until we start seeing the ITX versions of the R9 380 hit the market instead, as they’re bound to come soon with the launch of AMD’s new GPU lineup. Hopefully, they’ll bring a better price-to-performance ratio with them at the same time. ZAK STOREY
SPECIFICATIONS
GPU AMD Tonga
GCN cores 1,792
Memory capacity 2GB GDDR5
Rear I/O 2x Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-I
Dimensions (L x W x H) 171 x 110 x 35mm