XFX GTX285 Black Edition Review

RHKCommander959 - February 17, 2009
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Testing:

Video cards are tested by running them through a volley of benchmarks and then seeing where they fall. The results are then shown in comparison to other major competitive card configurations. The drivers are stock, with no settings modified, and the card is tested before and after being overclocked to see what performance can be gained. The test system seen below is just slightly overclocked, removing some of the bottleneck and allowing for the cards to speak for themselves. The speed of the i7 CPU is set to 3GHz, running with 6GB of triple channel DDR3. The GTX285 was tested with the newest available driver version, 181.22, while the ATI cards used Catalyst 8.12.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): XFX GTX285 Black Edition
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital Green 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64bit SP1

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

XFX GTX285 Black Edition 726/1632/1397

The XFX GTX285 Black Edition is already factory overclocked, so not much more can be squeezed out generally. I pushed for 36MHz more on the core and 97MHz on the memory, resulting in a 5% overclock on the core and 7% on the memory. Stock GTX285s run at 648/1242, so overall the clocks were 11% higher on core and memory than what nVidia sends out the door for stock cards.