Club 3D is based in the Netherlands with sales offices in Germany and North America. They were established in 1997 and became the first “Add in Board” with TAI Technologies (now AMD) back in 2001. They have one of the broadest ranges of AMD Radeon graphics cards in the industry, as well as power supplies and various other accessories. Today we will be taking a look at their Radeon R9 285 royalQueen.
On paper, the new R9 285 does not appear that different from the R9 280 it replaces. Those who are familiar with the R9 280 will notice that the new card features 2Gb of GDDR5 VRAM on a 256 bit bus versus the 3Gb of GDDR5 VRAM on a 384 bit bus. The new VRAM configuration makes the card cheaper to manufacture, while only having a modest impact on performance.
Most might even make the assumption that the R9 285 is simply another reconfiguration. Let us assure, it is not. The new R9 285 is built on the GCN 1.1 architecture. This adds a few of notable features that differentiate the R9 285 from the R9 280. The first of these is the R9 285 has a 32% lower TDP then its predecessor. The second is True Audio, a feature only available up till now on the R260(X) and R9 290(X) cards. Finally, like the R9 290(X) cards, the R9 285 does not need a Crossfire bridge.
