Date:
Thursday , January 15, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
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EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition

NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GTX 285 which is a refreshed GTX 280. We take a look at EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition with some insanely high clock speeds. Higher clocks hopefully mean better performance, and we see what kind of gameplay experience is delivered compared to the older GeForce GTX 280.

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System Test Setup

We will be using an EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3.

While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Driver Setup

Both NVIDIA and AMD provided us with new beta drivers. From NVIDIA we have ForceWare 181.20 with INFs to support GTX 285. From AMD we have 8.561.3 beta.

Here is a GPUz screenshot of the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition right after we installed drivers.

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in bar graph form with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.