NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 are based on the GT200 which is made in a 65nm process. Now NVIDIA has performed a die shrink on this design, to 55 nanometers. This results in a lower power consumption allowing new models to be built. The first two cards based on the 55nm GT200b chips are the GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 285. While the GeForce GTX 295 is a dual GPU design, the GeForce GTX 285 follows the traditional single GPU approach. With just a small marketing name improvement, the question has to be answered if this card is a worthy upgrade or if you are better off trying to find a great deal on the previous GeForce GTX 280 graphics card which might be lower priced. - techPowerUp

Leadtek WinFast GTX 285 1GB Graphics Card Review

In essence the GeForce GTX 285 card is rather a GeForce GTX 280 with about ten percent higher clocks and slightly changed PCB and cooler. The cornerstone specs like number of shaders, bus width and memory size have remained the same. Leadtek has put a fast race car on the front of the package which certainly does this video card justice. On the back you find the usual product specs and features highlighted. The GeForce GTX 285 board can be described as normal sized. Like all other high-end cards it uses a dual slot cooling solution. The card has two DVI ports which is really the standard output config nowadays.

The cooling assembly has been changed slightly. It still cools the GPU, memory and several other chips. You may combine several GeForce GTX 285 cards in SLI for higher performance and/or improved image quality. The card has two 6-pin power connectors and both are required for operation. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry a low latency of 0.77ns, which means they are specced to run at 2600MHz. NVIDIA has separated the display output logic from the GPU on the latest chips. That's why an additional chip is required to drive the DVI outputs. The GPU is the GT200b, which is made in a 55nm process.

NVIDIA has successfully implemented their 55nm production process for the GT200 GPU's resulting in the GeForce GTX 285 and also the GeForce GTX 295. The new card offers more performance, consumes less power and is quieter than the previous model. While this may sound nice on paper the improvements are only marginal and they cost you just about $70 extra. The clock increase yields about five percent performance averaged overall benchmarks, with the lead getting bigger the higher the resolutions are. So if you game at those 30inch ultra widescreen resolution you will see about ten percent performance increase.

We like NVIDIA's honest move to call their card old GeForce GTX 285 which is only a small increase of five over the GeForce GTX 280, suggesting to the less educated user what he can expect from this product. For NVIDIA the move to 55nm allows about a small decrease in die production cost savings which gives them more headroom to combat ATI's offerings with price reductions. The nice overclocking headroom that we saw on our sample from Leadtek will certainly be used to create special overclocked editions that give you full warranty for the overclock. We certain anticipate to see these hit the market shortly.

Overall the GeForce GTX 285 is an amazingly fast card that comes at a premium price just like it has always been if you wanted the latest and greatest. Though the greatest is this time not a single GPU based design, but the just recently announced dual GPU based GeForce GTX 295 graphics card.