Don't you hate it when you just bought the newest piece of technology and something that is supposed to be better and cooler comes out? I know I sure do but that seems to be the life of a computer enthusiast. It seems like every time I look at the news, I see a new revision of the current graphics card, better SSDs, larger hard drives or faster processors coming out. The big question for me is always how long do I wait to upgrade my machine? The answer for me is usually when there is a significant jump in the technology, this way I am not constantly spending money on small gains.

What seems to be happening with the industry is we are in this cycle of getting really small incremental gains in hardware. Typically, I am finding that you can skip a generation and still have a high performance system. Then there are times when you get a small leap in the supported features without too much gain in performance. In these cases, the benefits of the features that get added create the need to consider upgrading sooner. For example, we have the R9 285 GPU, which adds support for FreeSync and DirectX 12.

The PowerColor Radeon R9 285 graphics card comes with a total of 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus. The memory on the PowerColor R9 285 is clocked at 1375MHz, which equates to 5.5Gbps effective memory speed. Connectivity is supported through the Dual-Link DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort connections on the back of the card. There is also support for AMD Eyefinity for a multi-monitor support. The GPU core is clocked at 945MHz, up from the 918MHz stock clock speeds. It is built with next generation technologies in mind and includes support for AMD TrueAudio, Mantle, and FreeSync.