Asus EN GTX285 1GB Graphics Card

Introduction

After a long wait, the re-birth of the fastest single GPU based graphics card on the planet is here, the GTX285.

Successor to the phenomenally successful GTX280, the GTX285 has received a die shrink to 55nm as well as a slightly redesigned card as we shall see later in the review. Thanks to the shift over to the 55nm process Nvidia have used smaller transistors and as a result clockspeeds have been increased along with a reduction in power usage. This has allowed Nvidia to use 2x 6pin PCIe cables rather than the 280’s 6+8 pin configuration which should appeal to the wider market, especially those who don’t have an 8 pin PCIe cable at their disposal.

Power requirements aside, the main attraction of the 285 is the increased clockspeeds as standard. The GTX280 had a 602MHz / 2.2GHz core/memory clockspeed. This has been tweaked slightly to 648MHz / 2.484GHz. While this might not appear to be a huge increase, especially when compared to ATI clockspeeds, there will still hopefully be plenty of overclocking headroom left in the card as with the GTX280. Overclocked editions are already in the works, and no doubt Asus have the TOP edition ready to roll. But for todays review we will be looking at the standard, stock clocked ENGTX285 from Asus.

Nvidia boldly claim that they expect to see a 10% improvement over the GTX280 in benchmarks so it will be an interesting read to see if our results back up or dispute Nvidia’s claims. Let’s take a closer look at the GTX285’s specification…

 
Specification
 
  GTX 280
GTX 285
Fabrication
65nm 55nm
GPU Size 576 mm² 470 mm²
GPU Frequency 602 MHz 648 MHz
Shader Frequency 1296 MHz 1476 MHz
Memory Frequency 1107 MHz 1242 MHz
Memory Interface 512 Bit 512 Bit
ROPs 32 32
TMU’s 80 80
Stream processors 240 240
Memory 1024Mb 1024Mb
Memory bandwidth 140,7 GB/s 159,0 GB/s
Pixelrate 19.264 MP/s 20.736 MP/s
Texelrate 48.160 MT/s 51.840 MT/s
FLOPs 933 Gflops 1063 Gflops
TDP 236 Watt 183 Watt

With frequency increases of 7.6%(GPU), 13.9%(shader) and 12.2%(memory) to the GTX285 the increase in performance should equal out to around the 10% mark when compared to the GTX280. Power consumption has been decreased by 53W, so those worried about electricity bills should feel a little more relaxed, especially those intending to use a TRI-SLI setup! This power decrease should also reduce the heat given off by those increased frequencies but all this is conjecture at the present. Rest assured we will be looking into these claims during this review.

So, impressive figures indeed from the new revision. Let’s move on to the appearance and packaging section of todays review…