With the launch of the GeForce GTX 295 card last week, NVIDIA has started to roll out its 55nm GT200b GPU's onto the market. Today the company is rolling another new graphics card, the GeForce GTX 285 but unlike the GeForce GTX 295, this one utilizes just a single GT200b core. We spent some time going over the minor changes made in the GT200b during our article about the GeForce GTX 295 graphics card. The best way to think of GT200b though is that it's just GT200 on a finer manufacturing process with a few small enhancements. The GeForce GTX 285 is coming to market to replace the GeForce GTX 280 graphics card which has been NVIDIA's flagship product since last June. - Bit-Tech

Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB AMP! Style Card Review

Like the GeForce GTX 280, it features a full 240 stream processors arranged into ten stream processing clusters, 80 texture units and 32 raster operating units backing out onto a 512-bit memory interface. What NVIDIA has done is increase the clock speeds across the board. The core clock, at which the setup is set to 648MHz, while their stream processor and memory clocks are 1476MHz and 2484MHz respectively. However, rather than just stick with the existing design and just replace the GPU, NVIDIA has done some work on the PCB to optimise it in a number of ways, and moved all the memory chips to the front.

Zotac was the first manufacturer to get hardware to us ahead of the launch, but we've also received a couple of cards from BFG as well. Sadly, they didn't arrive in time to complete any SLI testing, but we will follow up with dual and 3-way SLI in another article in the near future. This is Zotac's flagship GeForce GTX 285, as denoted by the AMP! edition moniker, and the clock speed increases over the reference design are fairly significant. Physically, the card is exactly the same as the other two cards that we've got here and it's also the same as the reference card we've had our hands on briefly, which would be the same for all.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285 is just the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet, but it will face some tough competition amid the price cuts that have impacted both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards over the festive period. In terms of pricing, the real competition for the GeForce GTX 285 comes from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 at just $375. At that price, it's hard to beat but one has to remember that driver support is what feeds that card's success. And in games where the Radeon HD 4870 X2 scales poorly, so will the Radeon HD 4850 X2 realy. And how long it has taken to get official driver support from AMD.

From NVIDIA's side of the fence, the GeForce GTX 280 video card is the obvious competition and while the GeForce GTX 285 is faster, you have to ask if it's worth the additional outlay over the few GeForce GTX 280's that are still available. Of course, there are power consumption benefits to the GeForce GTX 285, but they're small. The other thing we haven't covered is overclocking, but based on our brief experience with overclocking, the 55nm cores seem to clock a little better. For someone upgrading from an existing GeForce GTX 200 series, there's no point in looking at the GeForce GTX 285, as to less performance gains.

This time though, there isn't a frankly huge price premium for the new model. With that in mind, if you're upgrading from a GeForce 8 series card, it might be worthwhile considering over the older GeForce GTX 280, but if you wanted a real performance boost, you'll need to look at the GeForce GTX 295 or Radeon HD 4870 X2. That puts us in two minds about the GeForce GTX 285, while it does nothing wrong on principle, it doesn't do a lot to convince us that it wants to be a part of your next build. There are however, better value and faster cards out there, which means the GeForce GTX 285's position in the market is a little awkward.