AMD's new Tonga-based Radeon R9 285 leaves me with mixed feelings. Performance has really seen no significant improvements since Tahiti, i.e. the R9 280(X). Sapphire's overclocked board performs exactly as well as the HD 7970, which is almost three years old now. AMD did not send us a reference board, so I had to clock the Sapphire card down to reference clocks, which made the R9 285 3% slower than the Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC and 5% faster than the GTX 760. Compared to the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, Sapphire's overclocked card is over 10% slower. I'm looking at 1080p here, which I believe to be the ideal resolution for the R9 285. While AMD tries to promote 1440p gaming on the card, I think it's just too slow for a really good gaming experience at the resolution. Overall performance considered, I'd say the R9 285 is an excellent card for 1080p gaming at maximum details.
Feature-wise, not much that really affects you has changed. Tonga adds support for TrueAudio, which has been available on Bonaire and Hawaii before and really didn't impress anyone. You can now use FreeSync in games on Tonga, but there are no FreeSync monitors, so we'll have to see if it'll be worth it. Mantle has been on the market for a while now. With some adoptions into games, it will hopefully pick up in the future. Last but not least, an improved display controller now allows you to run a 3-monitor EyeFinity setup without an active DisplayPort adapter.
In light of NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture, I expected AMD to introduce massive power consumption optimizations, but Tonga doesn't bring much in that regard. Single-monitor idle power consumption is improved, reaching levels that are more appropriate for 2014. Multi-monitor and Blu-ray power consumption is still bad, much worse than with any NVIDIA product. Gaming efficiency has improved by roughly 10% over the old Tahiti GPU, but that's not enough. The R9 28x Series (including the R9 285) is still the least power-efficient series on the market as NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture seems to be twice as efficient during gaming.
Sapphire's custom cooler does a good job keeping the card cool, delivering decent temperatures that match those we've seen from the R9 280(X). Idle noise levels are fine, but could be quieter. While fan noise during gaming has improved, it's still not where I'd like it to as it doesn't beat competing products. In gaming, the two fans will definitely be noticeable.
AMD's MSRP for the R9 285 is $249, and we expect the Sapphire R9 285 Dual-X OC to retail for around $260, which isn't too bad, but not good enough to take over the market. Right now, you can find GTX 770 cards discounted to an amazing $275, and these cards are significantly faster, quieter, and more power efficient. Another option would be to look at used HD 7970/R9 280X class cards that compete well with the R9 285 at better, used prices. This means AMD has to reduce their pricing to somewhere below the $230 mark to really get things moving. AMD's latest game bundle also includes loads of titles, old and new, you could pawn off to save some cost.