Gainward GTX 285 review
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 10 Mar 2009

For quite some time NVIDIA has been lagging behind ATI in terms of the production process used for their cards. While ATI shipped all of their series 3 and 4 cards in 55 nm, NVIDIA started using that process quite a bit later, and then only in certain lower positioned products. The GTX 285 is the first high end product to be shipped with a 55 nm GPU, along with the dual chip GTX 295.

The chip

The GT200 GPU is by far the largest one to date, with over 40% more transistors than the competing RV770 powering the 4800 series ATI cards. With size comes price, so NVIDIA has constantly been on the losing side of the price/performance ratio battle. It doesn’t really matter that you have an advanced card performing better if you are not price competitive. ATI was able to keep their price low due to the 55 nm production process and gained a nice market share on that account, but now that NVIDIA finally moved down to their level, it’s going to be a more equal battle. This B revision of the GT200 doesn’t bring any new features into play, so the only benefit is the reduced power consumption, along with the probably higher overclocking capabilities.

The card

Gainward’s interpretation of the GT200 is not that different from the reference design in terms of size and component placement, so the only big difference is the cooler. It now has two axial fans, instead of a radial one. The advantage of this approach is more air is pumped through the fins, but now the card doesn’t expel the hot air outside of the system case, which worsens the cooling of all components in your case. Temperature wise, the card is not very hot, and compared to the stock GTX280, the temperatures of the GPU are reduced by about 3-7 degrees, depending on the load.

The noise this new cooler makes is greater while idling, but when under load, it is considerably quieter than the stock cooler. Of course, if you are willing to sacrifice the temperatures for less noise, you can do that as well, especially in idle.

The card now has two 6-pin PCI-E connectors, down from 8+6 pinned ones in the GTX 280, which should be contributed to the die shrink. However, we have found that because of the increased clocks and probably voltages, the stock GTX 285 actually consumes more power than a stock GTX 280. Still, the 2 6-pin PCI-E connectors along with a PCI-E 2.0 slot provide more than enough power for the card.

Gainward ships the card with a modest bundle, which we always prefer as it keeps the price low. You will find all the necessary adapters in the box, as well as a driver CD.

To benchmark the card we used our standard testing platform and an array of games along with 3DMark 06 and Vantage. We used our standard testing platform:

- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650
- ASUS Striker II Extreme 790i SLI
- OCZ PC3-16000 2x2 GB
- Western Digital RaptorX 150 GB
- PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1KW-SR
- HP LP3065 display
- ATI Catalyst 9.2
- NVIDIA Forceware 182.08