During its 30 Years of Gaming and Graphics event on Saturday, AMD announced the Radeon R9 285, the newest addition to the company’s lineup of desktop graphics cards. As noted by Tom’s Hardware, the R9 285 is based around AMD’s Tonga Pro GPU: The board features a clock speed of 918MHz, and a memory speed of 5.5Gbps. Put it all together and you have a board that can deliver up to 3.29 teraFLOPS of computing performance. The R9 285 is a 190-watt PCI Express 3.0 board, and requires a pair of six-pin power connectors. As Tom’s Hardware points out, this compares favorably to the 250-watt power draw of the R9 285’s predecessor, the R9 280.
AMD has broadcast its “30 Year of Gaming and Graphics” live event via Twitch, where the company announced the Radeon R9 285 graphics card. This new product is equipped with the Tonga Pro GPU and is intended to succeed the Radeon R9 280, bringing a similar level of performance to a lower TDP and a lower price point. The GPU on this new card boasts 1792 stream processors, the same number as the current Radeon R9 280. The Radeon R9 285’s 918 MHz maximum GPU boost clock rate is slightly slower than the Radeon R9 280’s 933 MHz cap, though. On the other hand, the R9 285’s 1375 MHz actual/5.5 GHz effective memory speed is notably faster than the 280’s 1250 MHz/5.0 GHz specification, so net performance may be slightly faster. The Radeon R9 285 requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors and carries a maximum 190 Watt TDP, which is a good bit less than the Radeon R9 280’s 250 Watt maximum draw. In addition, the Radeon R9 285’s Tonga GPU supports new features such as AMD TrueAudio and FreeSync technology.
