Over the first week of September, multiple AMD board partners launched their versions of the Radeon R9 285. This new card is based on the third revision of AMD's GCN architecture, a 28nm GPU code-named Tonga that comes with a base clock of up to 918MHz for the core and 1375MHz on the memory. As the name would suggest, the R9 285 is here to take over the fight for the $250 MSRP price segment from the R9 280, with the prime target being the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760. Looking at the available numbers, the Tonga GPU brings to the table a total of 1792 stream processors, 112 texture units, and 32 ROPs much like the Radeon R9 280 and its Tahiti Pro2 chip. You can put your hands and eyebrows down, since that's pretty much where the similarities end!

The Tonga core takes a step up from Tahiti in offering four rasterisers and four tessellation units just like the Hawaii cores found in the higher end AMD offerings, namely the Radeon R9 290 and 290X. If these specs seem confusing, AMD made the new R9 285 even more intriguing by opting for a 2GB GDDR5 memory configuration running at 1375MHz (5500MHz effective) on a 256-bit interface which translates into 176GB/s total bandwidth. This is very close to what the Curacao XT-based Radeon R9 270X offers. The technical specs make this third generation GCN look like a mix of previous and recent AMD offerings and the feature list of the R9 285 confirms it. Tonga comes with the CrossFire XDMA technology, TrueAudio, and PowerTune. The new core also supports AMD's ambitious project FreeSync.

AMD did not provide any R9 285 reference cards that I know about at the time of writing. Instead, today I will be looking at the PowerColor variant of the card. Keeping true to its high standards and quest for performance, PowerColor tweaked the reference design of this card with some major customizations. The PowerColor R9 285 TurboDuo sports a "Gold Power Kit" including 5+1+1 phase power design, PowerPAK SO-8, and SVI2 Green Power management technology. PowerColor also bumped the stock core clock by a conservative 2.94% yelding 945MHz, while keeping the memory at the base frequency of 1375MHz. It did however fit the card with its custom TurboDuo cooling technology providing 13% lower acoustics and 15% lower temps, which might prove quite useful if the card has higher overclocking potential.