As our graphics card articles have gone a little bit red lately, we finally have something from the green team to compare to. In order to regain the king of the hill status back from AMD, NVIDIA has brought a couple of new competitors to the high-end market. The older GT200 core based GeForce GTX 280 was beaten by the Radeon HD 4870 X2, so NVIDIA had to cook up something new. Just like AMD, also NVIDIA decided to regain the thrown by combining two cores on the same card. This would have been a tremendous feat with the older GT200 core, as it was tremendously hot. The GT200b core was the solution they needed. In addition to lower manufacturing costs it also runs much cooler. - Metku

Gainward GeForce GTX 285 1GB Video Board Review

AMD already took the plunge into 55nm technology with the RV770 chipset last summer, and NVIDIA followed them a bit later with the GT200b chip. The GT200b really is just a shrunk GT200 that has been tweaked a little bit. We looked at the GeForce GTX 280 back in last July when it was the fastest card on the block. Today we have the newer version in our hands, the GeForce GTX 285. This time its left in the shadow, by its big brother, the GeForce GTX 295, which is based on the same sandwich structure like the GeForce 9800 GX2. The GeForce GTX 285 is still aimed at the Radeon HD 4870 X2, so there should be plenty of punch.

On the frontside the GeForce GTX 285 really is identical to the GeForce GTX 280. The cooler covers the whole front of the card and there really isn't anything to see, except the nice stickers that the manufacturers have stuck to their cards. All of the GeForce GTX 285's so far have been based completely on the reference design, so all of the cards at least look the same in general. You can spot the two power plugs that the card needs to operate. The decreased craving for power for the GPU chip can also be seen. Instead of using one 8-pin and one 6-pin power plug, the newer GeForce GTX 285 card only needs two 6-pin power plugs.

Overclocking this board was fairly nice and easy. RivaTuner was our program of choice once again, and it really made adjusting the clocks easy. The GPU clock scaled pretty nicely, with clocking all the way to 730MHz from 648MHz, a fairly nice improvement. The shaders didn't seem to like to overclock that well with this card. Now raising them over 1600MHz would result in freezes in the benchmark programs. The best part, of this card at least, was overclocking the memory. We were amazed how far their really stretched as we saw the first hints of corruption after raising their clocks over 2970MHz effective from their stock clocks.

All in all, the GeForce GTX 285 is a nice update of the GeForce GTX 280. Some may complain that it doesn't improve that much on the existing products. Sure, the core is just about the same as the GT200 found on the GeForce GTX 280 and the cards really look the same, but the card runs cooler and the newer technology used for the GT200b chip gives us some more headroom in clock speeds. We compared the GeForce GTX 285 to the CrossFire setups for a good reason as those two setups were close to the price of the GeForce GTX 285 depending on the particular versions you pick out of course.

The nice thing about CrossFire is that so many chipsets support it, while SLI is really only limited to NVIDIA's own chipsets or the newer Intel X58 chipset based motherboards. Despite the high price of this card we think it still brings decent value. This card outperformed our CrossFire setups nicely in some of the newer benchmarks, without SLI being used. Allowing users to use high settings without needing multiple graphics cards in their setup is highly valued, at least by us.