Date:
Tuesday , February 10, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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XFX GeForce GTX 285 Black Edition

The XFX “Black Edition” GTX 285 is shipped with clock frequencies well above GTX 285 reference clocks. It is faster than anything XFX has previously produced and is poised to deliver an experience beyond what the GTX 280 could deliver. Does it have value, or is it just faster for the sake of being faster?

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Test System Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Platinum series DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W.

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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.

Driver Setup

With both the NVIDIA and AMD video cards we will be using the latest WHQL drivers. For the NVIDIA video cards we will be using the ForceWare 181.22 WHQL driver. For the AMD video card we will be using the Catalyst 9.1 WHQL driver.

Below is a GPU-Z screenshot of the XFX GeForce GTX 285 Black Edition after we installed the 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 based on real gameplay as well.