AMD Radeon R9 285 GPU Review: Tonga Arrives

Name: AMD Radeon R9 285 GPU Review: Tonga Arrives
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 08:30 AM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely, power consumption, temperatures, and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

The Radeon R9 285 ended up being one of the more power-efficient cards we tested. At idle, the Radeon R9 285 consumed the least power of the bunch. And under load, despite offering better overall performance than the GeForce GTX 760, it consumed somewhat less power.

In terms of noise, the Sapphire Radeon R9 285 Dual-X was one of the quieter cards we've tested. We don't know how reference Radeon R9 285 cards will sound because we don't have one, but the custom model we tested was darn near silent.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, 285, Tonga

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com