The Card: Naked
As I stated before, the cooler is actually really easy to remove. Here you can see the wonderful design that GIGABYTE has used here to cool this graphics card. (Spoiler Alert – it performs its job very well) I was pleased to see an even distribution of the stock thermal grease and thermal pads spread out to take care of creating a thermal bridge to those other important components such as the VRM circuitry, mosfets, and memory chips. There are eight memory chips all located on the GPU-side of the graphics card providing you 2GB of total onboard memory. The memory onboard is GDDR5 and is manufactured by Elpida and is strapped to the GPU via a 256-bit bus. These chips are clocked at 1375 MHz (5500 MHz GDDR5 effective). Another detail of note is that all of the display connections are shielded as well which can reduce noise and interference to give the clearest signal possible.
The R9 285 AMD GPU is based on the recently released Tonga series which is manufactured on a 28nm process at TSMC, Taiwan. The medium sized 294 mm² die has an astounding 3.5 billion transistors. This DirectX 11.2 GPU comes overclocked to 973 MHz (stock clock is 918 MHz) and uses the GCN shader architecture.
So what about this graphics card’s performance? I am sure you are dying to know; so let us get on with the testing!
