14 DAY TRIAL // AMD hasn't actually launched the Radeon R9 285 graphics card yet, but it only plans to wait for one more week before it does that. In the meantime, websters are, naturally, looking for scoops on the OEM cards.
And it so happens that one of those OEM graphics cards has not only been discovered, but actually photographed a couple of times.
Called Radeon R9 285 Strix, it was put together by ASUS and looks very different from the reference version of the video adapter. The cooler is a dual-fan module, for one, instead of the stock fansink with one fan and the company's logo sticker on top.
Indeed, the cooler uses a DirectCU II heatsink, with a dense aluminum fin stack. It receives heat from the GPU via several nickel-plated heatpipes.
It's not clear yet if the heatpipes make direct contact with the GPU, or if there is a base plate they go through. We will learn this detail on September 2 no doubt, since that is when the card is expected to reach the market. That's when all Radeon R8 285 boards will be released in fact.
That said, two fans are used to disperse the heat spread across the heatsink. What's more, there is a backplate which dissipates whatever heat is produced by the chips mounted on the rear of the PCB (printed circuit board).
That only leaves the card specifications, and they are the same as the ones revealed during the webcast that AMD held back on Saturday, August 23.
The Tinga 28nm graphics processing unit has 1,792 GCN SPs (Graphics CoreNext stream processors), 112 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 32 ROPs (raster operating units).
It also has a 256-bit interface through which it connects to the VRAM. There are 2 GB of GDDR5, but ASUS may release a Strix with 4 GB as well. We'll have to wait and see.
Alas, the leak which exposed the ASUS Radeon R9 285 Strix did not say whether or not the clocks would be the same as on the reference board. With the better cooling, the company could easily overclock the GPU from 918 MHz to a full 1 GHz, and the memory from 5.5 GHz to 6 GHz. Even if the VRAM is left alone, the GPU, at least, could be tweaked straight from the factory.
Considering that the price of the card, when sales begin on September 2, will be the same $249 / €249 as for the others, keeping the stock specs is very likely.
Not that we expect ASUS to stop here even if it does. The company is bound to launch an overclocked board at some point, as well as a card with 4 GB VRAM instead of two.
