Sapphire Radeon R9 285 “Tonga Pro” Graphics Lineup Leaked – 2 GB, 4 GB and Mini-ITX Variants With Factory Overclocked Specs

Aug 23, 2014

We are just a few minutes away from the official announcement of the Radeon R9 285 graphics card but it seems like someone over manufacturer Sapphire’s website was misinformed and leaked the entire graphics card lineup prior to the event itself. The Sapphire Radeon R9 285 series lineup will feature six new variants which will include both reference and non-reference designs with 2 GB and 4 GB models available to consumers on 2nd September.

Sapphire Radeon R9 285 “Tonga Pro” Graphics Lineup Leaked

The Sapphire Radeon R9 285 will include four Dual-X variants along with two ITX compact variants. The M-ITX variants will be the first compact models from Sapphire which will feature a shorter PCB similar to the ASUS and MSI Mini-ITX and Gaming variants which have been met which a good response from the hardware community. The Radeon R9 285 Compact will feature a PCB measuring 171mm long and feature a single fan which will cool the heatsink assembly underneath it that utilizes a heatpipe design. The compact models will come in overclock and reference models.

The Dual-X model will be available in four variants, two 2 GB and two 4 GB models which will be available in reference and overclocked frequencies. The specifications of the Radeon R9 285 “Tonga Pro” based graphics cards are pretty straight forward now. For specifications, the card will 1792 stream processors, 112 texture mapping units and 32 ROPs. It will be available in 2 GB and 4 GB GDDR5 variants with memory running across a 256-bit bus interface and the clock speeds are maintained at 918 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory which result in a cumulative bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The power is provided through dual 6-Pin connectors and display outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI and a display port for all three cards. There’s another interesting thing regarding Radeon R9 285 that is the card makes use of AMD’s XDMA CrossFire technology. At the side of the PCB, we can see that AMD hasn’t featured Crossfire gold fingers but instead went with their XDMA route allowing upto 2 GPUs to work in harmony sharing an interconnect path via the PCI-e. This technology has already proved well for the Hawaii graphics cards and the reason why no other cards than Hawaii and Tonga feature this is because the rest of AMD’s lineup were rebrands of previous generation chips.

The Radeon R9 285 will be price in the $250 US range which means that Tahiti based cards will be receiving a major price cut as hinted previously to make room for the new cards otherwise having both Tahiti XT and Tonga at the same price will mean poor sales for the inferior product of the two. The card will launch on 2nd September and more details are expected in a few minutes when the event starts. We have a live blog set up just for you which you would be willing to take a look at for live updates regarding the event here.

AMD Radeon R9 285 “Tonga” Specification Sheet”:

	AMD Radeon R7 260X	AMD Radeon R9 270	AMD Radeon R9 270X	AMD Radeon R9 280	AMD Radeon R9 280X	AMD Radeon R9 285	AMD Radeon R9 285X “Rumor”	AMD Radeon R9 290	AMD Radeon R9 290X	AMD Radeon R9 295X “Rumor”	AMD Radeon R9 295X2
GPU Core	Neptune XT	Curacao Pro	Curacao XT	Tahiti Pro	Tahiti XT	Tonga Pro	Tonga XT	Hawaii Pro	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XTX	Vesuvius
GPU Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU Cores	896	1280	1280	1792	2048	1792	2048	2560	2816	2816	5632
Core Clock	1100 MHz	900 MHz	975 MHz	933 MHz	1000 MHz	918 MHz	TBA	947 MHz	1000 MHz	~1100 MHz	1018 MHz
VRAM	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5?	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	8 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1625 MHz	1400 MHz	1400 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1375 MHz	1500 MHz?	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	~1250 MHz	1250 MHz
Memory Bus	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit?	512-bit	512-bit	512-bit	512-bitx2
Memory Bandwidth	104.0 GB/s	179.2 GB/s	179.2 GB/s	224.4 GB/s	288.0 GB/s	176.2 GB/s	288.0 GB/s?	320 GB/s	320 GB/s	320 GB/s	320 GB/s x 2
TMUs / ROPs	56 / 16	80 / 32	80 / 32	116 / 32	128 / 32	112 / 32	128 / 32	160 / 64	176 / 64	176 / 64	176 / 64 x 2