14 DAY TRIAL // AMD held a webcast back on Saturday (August 23), during which it reminisced on the past few decades and revealed a few things that would happen next.
The Never Settle: Space Edition driver pack was one thing, and the Radeon R9 285 video board, based on the Tonga graphics processing unit, was the other main thing.
Not that the latter is actually selling. You see, the Radeon R9 285 won't be available before September 2, 2014, which is next week.
However, that it's stopping AMD's OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) from revealing their respective versions of the card, indirectly or otherwise.
We've already seen the ASUS Radeon R9 285 Strix, and now we're looking at the Sapphire Radeon R9 285 ITX Compact. The company no doubt felt that it would do well in mini PCs or HTPCs.
Admittedly, mid-range video boards nowadays are what used to be considered high-end before PCU integrated graphics became prevalent. So the R9 285 is an upper “performance-level” board, but we digress. Anyway, the price of $249 / €249 fits quite well with that range really.
The Sapphire Radeon R9 285 ITX Compact is quite unique and will probably stand out even after every other OEM R9 285 is released, because of its short PCB of just 170 mm / 6.69 inches.
It's still a dual-slot video board though. Its aluminum fin is pretty dense, to make up for the lesser cooling area. A single 100 mm fan provides ventilation.
That said, the specifications haven't been changed. The Tonga GPU, with its 1,792 GCN cores and 112 TMU and 32 ROPs, still works at 918 MHz, while the 2 GB of GDDR5 (controlled by the GPU through a 256-bit interface) runs at 5.5 GHz.
Everything is powered by a pair of 6-pin PCI Express connectors, and a single 8-pin to two 6-pin adapter is included, to free up your PSU's ports in case you want to set up a dual-card system. Finally, a pair of mini-DisplayPort connectors and an HDMI 1.4a port are present, plus a dual-link DVI with analog VGA pins and an adapter for it.
Like every other R9 285 video board, the Sapphire R9 285 will start shipping worldwide on September 2, though some retailers may jump the gun. A version with 10 MHz overclock will be sold then as well.
