SAPPHIRE DUAL-X OC R9-285 Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅07-09-14
Testing Methodology and Benching System
How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphic card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Frame Time Analysis
We have also seen the emergence of frame time analysis. We covered this in a separate article here: GPU Reviews: Why Frame Time Analysis is important so we won't go into the reasoning again but to summarise, our testing comprises both FPS testing and perhaps arguably more importantly, frame time analysis. We also look at overall performance by equating averages across the games and finally before concluding our review we take a look at value for money.

HardwareWith the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X79 setup to the very latest X99 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic, achieveable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of GDDR4 at 2666MHz and a 500GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card's performance.

High End Graphics cards on test:



SAPPHIRE DUAL-X OC R9-285 OC
(Catalyst 14.3)
XFX R9-280 Black Edition OC 3GB GDDR5(Catalyst 14.3)
PALIT GTX 760GB 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 340.52)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:



Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we have chosen:

Battlefield 4
Watchdogs
Company of Heroes 2
Thief
GRID: 2
Metro: Last Light


We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included 3 of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:
Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike


Let's see how today's graphics card performed...

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