Synthetic Benchmarks
While synthetic benchmarks may not represent what you will see when you get into real gaming, they are still a good way to compare performance from card to card. The benchmarks are consistent no matter how many times you run them. For the ITX Compact this gave me a level playing field to put it up against all of the previous cards we have tested to see how well the new Tonga powered R9 285 would perform as well as to see how well the ITX card performs compared to the previous ITX cards tested. In both 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme the Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285 fell around in the same spot, in the top 1/3 of the cards. This fell right in the middle of all of the GTX 770’s and well above the other ITX cards. In Unreal Heaven benchmark, the numbers were slightly lower but still up above the highly overclocked GTX 760 Hawk.
When all of our testing was done I dropped the ITX Compact into Lunchbox 3 and ran through 3DMark Fire Strike again just to take a look at the overall difference using our LAN setup. As you can see, there was a big jump in overall performance going from the GTX 670 to the R9 285, I think I might have to leave the Sapphire card in from now on!