One of the options with launching a new expensive graphics solution in these financially troubled times is to take an old product, and move it to your new manufacturing process, overclock it and voila. The GeForce GTX 285 is basically a GeForce GTX 280 with the same number of shaders and the same memory interface that has been moved from 65nm to 55nm process with clock speeds increased on the memory, shaders and core, is something many manufacturers have already done with their GeForce GTX 280 powered boards. It seems that NVIDIA thinks this might work with their new GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards that we are looking at today and find out what this really means. - t-break

Zotac GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Graphics Board Review

One of the benefits that generally comes with a better manufacturing process is that power drawn is lesser than the previous generation and smaller chips tend to run cooler. We will see how that goes but in essence, their GeForce GTX 285 seems more like a replacement than an addition to the NVIDIA lineup. Instead of going with an over the top packaging, Zotac chose a rather small size for the high-end single GPU board in the market today. We continue to see the orange with black combination that Zotac uses on all their products and the see-thru cover shows the actual product inside, a nice to have for potential buyers.

Speaking of inside, Zotac bundles their GeForce GTX 285 AMP! edition with a full version of the reasonably popular car racing game GRiD and on top also 3DMark Vantage. The card itself looks very familiar which is just normal as it is somehow a refresh of the GeForce GTX 280, though the back side does not have a cover this time around. And at the top, we have two SLI connectors for up to 3-way SLI while two DVI outputs and one composite output are found on the backplate. The rear of the card features two 6-pin power connectors which is a bit different than the GeForce GTX 280 which had one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector.

Looking at the benchmarks there are a few observations to be made. First of all, a stock GeForce GTX 285 card doesn't really perform any better than the original GeForce GTX 280 overclocked to match the higher clock speeds. This gives no reason for current GeForce GTX 280 owners to upgrade as far as performance is concerned. Zotac further overclocks their GeForce GTX 285 which is why you see a noticeable difference between that and the original GeForce GTX 280 but really, so anybody with a bit of overclocking experience can pretty much achieve results almost as good as the Zotac version, and maybe even a bit more.

While we are talking about overclocking, we weren't able to take this GeForce GTX 285 card much higher than Zotac's overclocked speeds, since at 715MHz core we started seeing artifacts. Now unfortunately, we don't have any device for measuring power usage so we can't provide you with specific numbers but NVIDIA recommends a 550W power supply for this card which is a pretty good thing. We did measure temperatures that were about 41°C in idle and 80°C under load. NVIDIA manages the lower the idle temperatures by dropping the speeds in 2D mode which results in a fast drop in temperatures by a simple action.

Next up is the question from someone who is looking to upgrade from a previous generation of GeForce 9 series from NVIDIA or the Radeon HD 3800 series from AMD. Again, judging from the results a dual GPU card is probably a better option as far as performance goes where we see the Radeon HD 4870 X2 pretty much on top of the GeForce GTX 285 is most the benchmarks. The drivers for dual GPU cards seem mature and more games are taking advantage of such a setup. We haven't tested NVIDIA's dual GPU based GeForce GTX 295 yet so we can't comment on that but things seem pretty smooth sailing with AMD's X2 solution.

The price for the GeForce GTX 285 is roughly $375. Add about $50 and you can get yourself a Radeon HD 4870 x2 which is very much worth the price difference. In our opinion, the GeForce GTX 285 doesn't really make sense at the moment. And yes, it is the fastest single GPU setup at the moment but maybe the days of single GPU solutions are numbered.