 The AMD R9 280 launch was a confusing one at the time, because to the informed guy it was obvious that what AMD had done was create a lot of fanfare with a Hawaii launch event for what was, other than the R9 290 and 290X, which both featured newly designed silicon, basically an exercise in taking existing card designs and giving them a shiny new name. That means the current 200 series is actually a mix of old and new hardware designs. It's fine from a performance standpoint, as long as the pricing makes sense, but it can lead to confusion. Even at that launch event, AMD talked a lot about true audio, a feature that up until now has only been supported on the R9 260X and R9 290 series. And then again at CES this year, they showed off FreeSync, a dynamic refresh rate technology similar to G-Sync to reduce screen tearing, but since revealed that that also only works on part of their current lineup, because of this mix of old and new technology. So, with that out of the way, onto the card we're introducing today. The R9 285, based on new code name Tonga Silicon, might not be earth-shattering from a performance standpoint, but what it does, aside from delivering great power efficiency, is bring the $250 price point in line with high-end enthusiast cards from a feature standpoint, with improved mantle support, along with support for true audio, bridge-less crossfire, updated power-tuned dynamic performance optimization, and finally, FreeSync. With the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor, SSD, or NUC, you could instantly win an Intel gaming jersey and be entered in the draw for the ultimate system. Click now to learn more. Now, when I said the card wasn't going to deliver groundbreaking performance, I probably wasn't telling the very clever among you anything you didn't already know. When we look at its specs compared to the R9 280, whose price point it pretty much replaces, it features the same number of cores, texture, and render output units, it has a slightly lower clock speed, it has a narrower 256-bit memory bus, with 33% less memory overall, so that's 2 gigs of GDDR5, then it has a slightly higher memory clock to compensate for some of those other deficiencies, and it features a 5% lower TDP, meaning that heat output will be reduced. Of course, though, with GPUs, it's never about comparing specs head-to-head directly, and AMD has made some tweaks under the hood that will improve tessellation performance, compute performance, and memory performance that they hope will make up for some of these spec deficiencies. On top of that, AMD has added a couple of multimedia features, including automatic configuration of the speakers in your iFINITY monitor or TV setup as left, mid, and right channels, along with hardware H.264 4K encode and decode support that will significantly reduce power consumption when playing back 4K content. This is a feature that even the new Hawaii R9 290 series GPUs don't have. AMD's engineers have been busy. Now, AMD didn't send us a reference card, so let's take a minute to appreciate the specifics of the Gigabyte Windforce Edition card that we have received. Like all Gigabyte Windforce graphics cards, it features an open airflow non-reference Windforce branded cooler. That enough Windforce for you? This one features a dual heat pipe and aluminum fin design that did a great job of keeping the 285 cool in our testing. It's got two DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort. It's got dual 100mm fans. It's got reversed PCI Express power connectors, which is actually quite nice for cable management, a PCI Express 16x slot on the bottom, and no bridge connector at the top is needed thanks to the XDMA Crossfire support in the Tonga GPU. But you don't just want to watch me stare at this GPU thing for seven minutes, do you? No, no. You want to know about the performance. Well, here it is. Take it away, Luke. All right, guys. Remember how I used to sound like a zombie all the time? Well, I'm back! First of all, none of these cards are actually overclocked. A large number of you guys have been asking us to run our benchmarks not overclocked for some time now, and we've decided to see how it goes. There's also been a platform change. We have swapped out our old platform for a new ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard, a 5930K running at stock, and 16GB of G.Skill memory also running at a stock speed of 2133MHz. Due to a horrible naming scheme, it can be a little bit confusing figuring out where the R9285 lands in AMD's product stack. To try to show where the card falls in the general graphics card landscape, we decided to benchmark it against a GTX 760, which should be fairly similar in both price and performance. Then I threw it against a GTX 750 Ti and an R9 290 in order to represent some other fairly common price points as well. AMD fans will be happy to hear that the R9285 performed admirably in the games that I tested in, beating out the GTX 760 in two out of three tests and proving its worth in its price bracket. To be honest though, this is pretty much exactly what was expected of this graphics card as the graphics card game has been pretty easy to predict as of late. Well, that's it for Zombie Voice. Back to you, Linus. So there you have it, folks. It performs about as expected. But here's something you might not have expected. AMD is refreshing their Never Settle Game Bundle program. Now it's Space Edition. And this one qualifies for the Gold Level, so you can pick up to any three of the 29 games available. Check it out. For gamers buying graphics cards, an appealing game that they were planning to pick up anyway can be a very compelling value add. So it's conclusion time. You get a DirectX 12 GPU that's feature complete compared to the rest of AMD's lineup and performs about like you'd expect an AMD GPU that costs 250 bucks to perform. Hard to go wrong. Not the most stunning or exciting conclusion ever, but this isn't the most stunning or exciting card ever either. Not that being a trusty workhorse is a bad thing. It sold a lot of R9 280s for AMD and it'll do the same with the R9 285. Thanks for watching, guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know what you thought of the video. 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