Testing Configuration and 3DMark Vantaqe

System Setup and Comparisons

The new GeForce GTX 285 testing was quick – but not by my doing.  Getting the card in 12 hours before the NDA can do that you know.  In any event, performance on the GTX 285 cards shouldn’t be too surprising as we have likely seen very similar performance with highly overclocked GTX 280 models as well.  The architecture is identical so what we are really interested in seeing is how much faster the GTX 285 is than the GTX 280 and how much more power efficient it is as well. 

For my testing I put the new BFG and ASUS GTX 285 cards up against an aging BFG GTX 280 OC card, an overclocked GTX 260+ as well as the Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB card – a bit outside the price range of the new GTX 285 but you can use that data point to compare it with the single HD 4870 or GTX 295 as well. 

UPDATE: BFG apparently has had some issues with yields at these speeds and we got an email THIS MORNING that the clocks were being pulled back on the OCX model.  The new clocks will be 702 MHz/1584 MHz/1332 MHz, respectively.  The changes shouldn’t result in too dramatic a shift in the performance numbers we are showing you in this piece though.

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650

Motherboards

EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard – NVIDIA GPUs

Memory 

OCZ Technology 2 x 2GB DDR-1333

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor 150 GB – Review

Sound Card

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX 1GB
ASUS ENGTX275 TOP 1GB
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC 1GB
AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB

Video Drivers

NVIDIA Forceware 181.20 Beta
AMD Catalyst HD 8.12 Beta
Power Supply PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt

DirectX Version

DX10 / DX9c

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

  • Crysis
  • Far Cry 2
  • 3DMark Vantage
55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 50

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 51

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 52



55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 53

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 54

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 55

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 56

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 57

55nm GT200: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 58

Interestingly, as the resolution increases, the new GTX 285 cards look better and better when compared to the GTX 280.  The BFG model is about 18% faster at the Extreme preset than the original, but still overclocked, GTX 280 card. 

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