Shootouts

The Zenith of 3D Gaming - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 Roundup

By Kenny Yeo & Vincent Chang - 23 Dec 2009

The Cards

The ASUS GTX285 Matrix

The cooler here might look identical to NVIDIA's reference design, but ASUS says its heat pipes are over 40% thicker and operating temperatures should be 12% lower than bone stock cards.


The ASUS GTX285 Matrix forms part of ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) series of hardware, and as such boasts a few gamer-centric features. Apart from its custom cooler which promises better cooling efficiency, it comes factory overclocked at 669MHz at the core, 2484MHz DDR at the memory and 1512MHz at the shader processors.

More impressive, however, is the bundled iTracker2 software which allows you to adjust a host of parameters to boost the performance of the card. The software also allows users to burn their overclocked GPU core clock and memory clock into the BIOS, and should things go awry, a handy BIOS reset button allows you to restore the card to its default settings.

The Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition

In terms of sheer size, none comes close to he Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition. A true giant amongst giants.

Loyal readers of our site should find the Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition familiar, because the card was favorably received when we last reviewed it in June. Sporting a massive triple-fan custom cooling solution, we found the GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition to be a highly effective overclocker.

It also comes factory-overclocked, at 695MHz at the core, 2500MHz DDR at the memory and 1500MHz at the shaders. It'll be interesting to see how it copes with the other overclocked beasts in our tests.

The MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC

The Twin-Frozr cooler which the MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC uses is the exact same one that is found on their "Lightning" series of cards

The MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC is yet another feature-packed graphics card aimed at gaming and graphics enthusiasts. Featuring MSI's very own Twin-Frozr cooler, which uses five extra thick 8mm heat pipes, MSI promises the card to run much cooler than its stock counterpart.

Like the ASUS and Galaxy card, the MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC comes factory-overclocked as well. It's respectably overclocked with the GPU core at 680MHz, whereas the memory and shaders are at 2500MHz DDR and 1476MHz respectively.

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