XFX GeForce GTX 285 Black Edition Review :: Card

Card

Fan

Rear of PCB

Fan area

The look of the card may look familiar to many a person who has seen a GTX280 video card from NVIDIA with the exception of the bare back of the PCB. This is to be expected as the cards are almost identical in specification and the cooling system is sufficient for both the GTX 280 and GTX 285. XFX chose to use an all-black color scheme to go along with the naming of the card. The front of the card has the XFX logo and the Black Edition logo.

2-slots

Rear view

SLI bridge

Bracket

The cooling on the card is the standard 2-slot cooling system found on almost all NVIDIA reference cards. There is a grill on top of the heatsink where air is pulled out of the card from the chip. The cooling fan on the card is the standard 47-fin fan which blows air through the top of the card and through the grill on the front IO of the card. The rear of the card has the circuits and mounting bracket for the GPU. Here is also where the part number, serial number and FCC compliance stickers are located.

Power connectors

PCI Express

The GTX 280 was a bit of a power hungry beast, requiring 235W of power to power the card. With the transition to the 55 nanometer process, the chip is much smaller (100mm2 smaller in fact) than the GTX280. Smaller dies means higher clock-speeds and lower power requirements. The GTX285 requires 183W of power compared to the 235W of the GTX280. The top of the card has two 6-pin power connectors, which is a nice contrast to the 8-pin and 6-pin the GTX280 possesses.

Top view

IO

The IO on the card is important to determine what monitors the card supports and what the card can attach it onto. The Black Edition card comes with two Dual-Link DVI outputs and a TV-Out port. This is the standard configuration for video cards with HDCP supported. High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support allows the user to watch protected videos assuming they have a license to view the content.