Shootouts

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

By Kenny Yeo & Vincent Chang - 23 Dec 2009

The Cards (cont'd.) & Test Setup

The Palit GeForce GTX 285

The Palit GeForce GTX 285 was one of the first cards utilizing NVIDIA's flagship chip to come with a custom cooler.

Palit was one of the first vendors to offer customized cooling solutions on NVIDIA's GTX 200 class cards, and it was no different for the GeForce GTX 285 variant. Sadly, however, Palit has decided to retain NVIDIA's reference clock speed, which means the Palit GeForce GTX 285 is clocked 648MHz, 2484MHz DDR and 1476MHz at the core, memory and shaders respectively.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition

The Zotac card might look no different from a stock GeForce GTX 285, but underneath it lies a GTX 285 chip that's been heavily tweaked - to 702MHz at the core, in fact.

The last card in our roundup is Zotac's GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition. It's a bit of an oddball because it is the only card still sporting NVIDIA's reference cooler. Despite that however, it comes out of the factory with the highest clock speeds - 702MHz at the core, 2592MHz DDR at the memory and 1512MHz at the shaders. This is significantly higher than any of the other cards here and should help the Zotac card seal the first place for performance concerns.

Test Setup

The graphics cards were tested using our Vista system which has the following specifications:

Windows Vista SP1 Test System:

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
  • Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
  • 2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
  • Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  • Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

To determine the best card, we'll be paying special attention to their performance, efficiency of their custom coolers and their willingness to overclock. To establish a baseline reference, we have also included results of a bone stock NVIDIA reference GeForce GTX 285.

Here's a summary of the cards' clock speeds.

Summary of Clock Speeds
Card / Clock speed Core (MHz) Memory (DDR MHz) Shaders (MHz)
ASUS GTX285 Matrix 669 2484 1512
Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition 695 2500 1500
MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC 680 2500 1476
Palit GeForce GTX 285 648 2484 1476
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition 702 2592 1512
Reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 648 2484 1476

Here is the full list of cards tested and their driver versions used:

  • ASUS GTX285 Matrix (ForceWare 191.07)
  • Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition (ForceWare 191.07)
  • MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC (ForceWare 191.07)
  • Palit GeForce GTX 285 (ForceWare 191.07)
  • Zotac GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition (ForceWare 191.07)
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 1GB GDDR3 (ForceWare 191.07)


The cards were tested using the following benchmarks:

  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • Crysis Warhead
  • Far Cry 2
  • Warhammer: Dawn of War 2

 

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