Gainward GTX285

Review Pages

1. About the Gainward GTX285 Graphics card, package
2. Testbed
3. Benchmark settings
4. Benchmarks - FutureMark Hall Of Fame
5. Benchmarks - Crysis (DirectX10)
6. Benchmarks - Crysis Warhead (DirectX9, DirectX10)
7. Performance comparison - Crysis Warhead
8. Benchmarks - Company Of Heroes v1.71 (DirectX 10)
9. Benchmarks - Far Cry 2 (DirectX 9/10)
10. Benchmarks - Half Life 2 Episode 2 (DirectX 9), Left4Dead
11. Overclocking, conclusions

Nvidia has recently announced the GTX285/295 series of graphics cards promising to offer improved gaming experience at a more affordable price tag. Gainward has introduced their own solution based at the generic Nvidia GTX285 model. The Gainward GTX285 has 1GB of DDR3 and it is clocked at 648MHz. Today we will have the chance to compare the new card with other graphics solutions by both Nvidia and AMD/ATI.

The GTX285 marked Nvidia's transition to the 55nm manufacturing process that would further boost speed and decrease the power consumption and therefore, the produced heat. Below is a table showing the main differences among the Nvidia 2xx graphics chips.

	GTX 295	GTX 285	GTX 280	GTX 260 Core 216	GTX 260
Stream Processors	2 x 240	240	240	216	192
Texture Address / Filtering	2 x 80 / 80	80 / 80	80 / 80	72/72	64 / 64
ROPs	28	32	32	28	28
Core Clock	576MHz	648MHz	602MHz	576MHz	576MHz
Shader Clock	1242MHz	1476MHz	1296MHz	1242MHz	1242MHz
Memory Clock	999MHz	1242MHz	1107MHz	999MHz	999MHz
Memory Bus Width	2 x 448-bit	512-bit	512-bit	448-bit	448-bit
Frame Buffer	2 x 896MB	1GB	1GB	896MB	896MB
Transistor Count	2 x 1.4B	1.4B	1.4B	1.4B	1.4B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 55nm	TSMC 55nm	TSMC 65nm	TSMC 65nm	TSMC 65nm
Price	$500	$400	$350 - $400	$250 - $300	$250 - $300

The Gainward GTX285 is based on the generic Nvidia card, with a 648MHz core, 1476MHz shader and 1242MHz memory clocks. Hopefully this product would be ideal for demanding games like Crysis and L4D as we will see later.

- The package

The Gainward GTX285 package has been redesigned as you can see in the picture below. The various logos on the blue-colored box provide basic information about the features on the product.. The card has 1024MB of GDDR3 onboard, it is HDCP-ready for Blu-ray playback and it can be connected to your TV or HD monitor through HDMI via adapter. It's retail price is around ~€362 (including VAT), making it €40-50 cheaper than the ATI 4870X2.

The graphics card is well protected placed into the box into a plastic antistatic packaging. In the box you will also find a printed manual, a driver's disc, a molex-to-pci-e adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, a DSub-to-DVI-D adapter, a TV-out cable with HDTV support and finally an Internal SPDIF cable, for HDMI audio support. No retail game is bundled here:

The Gainward GTX285 is kept cool using a cooler with a 80mm fan, following Nvidia's stock design.

The available ports include two DVI-D and another one for HDTV.

Make sure to use at least two 6-pin power jacks in order to efficiently power the graphics card. This also means that your PSU should better offer at least 600 Watts of total power.

For all the tests we used the the latest Nvidia drivers (182.06) in order to get the highest possible performance, especially with the latest DX10 game titles.

As you can see below, the GPU core runs at 648MHz and the memory at 1242MHz. The GPU-Z software provides all the needed information for our eyes:

The same software also reports the temperatures of the various parts of the board. We should also note here that the GTX285 is rather quiet compared to other graphics cards we have tested here at CDRinfo.