14 DAY TRIAL // So far this month, NVIDIA hasn't really launched anything new, though it might only have to do with the month not being even halfway done.
The green GPU maker did reveal, indirectly or otherwise, some of what will come to pass soon though. Like the release of the GeForce GTX 880 G1 and the Quadro Kx2 Series Pro.
AMD seems to be a bit more active though, as it was previously revealed, or reported at least, that the company would launch a new GPU this month, called the Tonga.
And now here we are. We've already covered the HIS Radeon R9 285, but that's not the only version of the Tonga-powered graphics card coming out soon.
According to a new report, Sapphire is working on a card as well, which is pretty much identical to the HIS one.
Sure, they have different, proprietary coolers, and we can't say for sure how alike their performance is without some spec sheets to compare.
But the video cards. These Radeon R9 285 do resemble each other, from the dual-fan coolers (albeit different models, as we said) to the 2 GB of GDDR5 memory.
It's a real shame that we have no idea what clock speed the VRAM works at. Probably 5 GHz or so, since the R8 285 is supposed to match up against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.
We do know that the Tonga graphics processing unit has 32 CUs (compute units) and 2,048 SPs (stream processors), but even these numbers have not been confirmed.
Given the reports about several OEM R9 285 video adapters, it's possible that the unveiling will happen sometime this week or the next. Also, since the GeForce GTX 760 will be the main competitor, the price of AMD's R9 285 should land in the range of $230 - $250 / €230 - €250.
You might notice the thick copper heatpipes that Sapphire's R9 285 sports. They indicate a good heat dissipation, which means that Sapphire probably tweaked the base clocks a fair bit here. Whether or not it will be easy or even possible to manually overclock the card even further (despite the non-X status of the board) remains to be seen.
