Overall and Final Verdict
When I first heard that Sapphire was going to produce a Mini-ITX focused video card I was extremely excited. While the other manufactures did a great job, I was curious to see how Sapphire would go about it. With the most recent AMD cards Sapphire really stepped up and showed everyone that they can produce their own designs to match and in a lot of cases beat the performance of the other manufactures. They did this by taking the time to create coolers to fit each specific card design. The ITX Compact R9 285 is no different. While some of the other manufactures just followed the original formula for a small video card, they started fresh and put together a unique cooling design that ended up out performing all of the other ITX cards on the market in heat testing. By keeping the heat down they were able to pack in a faster GPU and with that outperform the other cards by a large margin. Really my only complains about the card were fairly trivial compared to its performance. I would have preferred to see the power plug face up on the card, the way they orientated it adds to the length of the card limiting how small you can go for a case. I would have also preferred to see a second DVI connection, but frankly how many of us are bringing multiple monitors to LANs anyhow, and when we do they will most likely support the HDMI.
The last thing to consider is where does the Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285 stand price wise. When compared to the other R9 285’s on the market you are paying $10 more than the basic cards and it matches the prices of the overclocked cards. Compared to the other ITX cards you are also paying $10 more, but when you take into account the big jump in performance I feel it is actually a better value. At the end of the day, not only do I plan on using this card in the Lunchbox 3, but I would also put it at the top of the list of cards to consider when shopping for a small form factor build.