I absolutely love building Mini-ITX gaming rigs. Every time I build a new Lunchbox (what I call our LAN rigs), I try to make them smaller and faster. Either of those along can be a challenge, but trying to constantly pack a faster rig into a small can be a huge challenge. Thankfully recently motherboard manufactures, video card manufactures, and heatsink manufactures have taken notice and have started to make things easier. With the launch of the R9 285 Sapphire jumped into that same market with their first Mini-ITX focused video card. With their focus on attending LANs this wasn’t a huge shock. What was surprising was the fact they went with the new R9 285 when MSI has the R9 270 and GTX 760. I have no doubt that the ITX Compact R9 285 will outperform the other Mini-TX cards, heck we proved that live at our LAN last weekend. Power usage and heat are also important in small form factor builds, I can’t wait to see how well it will perform.  

Product Name: Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285

Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

 

Specifications

Display Support

4 x Maximum Display Monitor(s) support

Output

1 x HDMI (with 3D)

2 x Mini-DisplayPort

1 x Dual-Link DVI-I

GPU

918 MHz Core Clock

28 nm Chip

1792 x Stream Processors

Video Memory

2048 MB Size

256 -bit GDDR5

5500 MHz Effective

Dimension

171(L)X110(W)X35(H) mm Size.

2 x slot

Software

Driver CD

SAPPHIRE TriXX Utility

Accessory

DVI to VGA Adapter

Mini-DP to DP Cable

HDMI 1.4a high speed 1.8 meter cable(Full Retail SKU only)

1 x 8 Pin to 6 Pin x2 Power adaptor

 


Packaging

While the ITX Compact is a completely different card from what Sapphire normally produces, the packaging is still a lot like the rest of their product line. Other than the ITX Compact logo up in the top left corner you wouldn’t know this is a special card. I would love to see them drop the artwork on the front and show off the card right on the cover, considering the product name is already printed on the box it’s not like they can reuse the box for other things. The rest of the cover is mostly covered with circles with information like the 2GB of GDDR5, Eyefinity support, and support for 4K. Around on the back there is a little more information about the card but still no photos of the card itself or even a picture of the connections available on the card. You do still get a specification listing down on the bottom of the box though.

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Inside the box, you have a Sapphire mouse pad right on top. The card is wrapped up in a bubble wrap bag and sitting in the cardboard tray keeping it secure and protected. For accessories you get a two six pin to 8 pin adapter, a Mini DisplayPort to full sized DisplayPort adapter and a DVI to VGA adapter. As always, Sapphire also includes an HDMI cable, something that no one else does and it adds to the cards value. For documentation, you get a driver disc, a quick installation guide, and a paper about how to sign up for the sapphire club.

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Card Layout and Photos

While the card is shorter than normal, I love that Sapphire went their own direction and didn’t follow all of the other manufactures that have been making ITX video cards. Other than the single fan where we would normally see two, the ITX Compact R9 285 still has the Sapphire styling. You get a silver fan shroud with black trim that should go with nearly any build you put together. There aren’t any lights or anything else fancy, but you still get a small Sapphire logo on the fan shroud and on the fan itself. There is also a “Compact” logo along the top edge and on the front. They followed the KISS method, Keep It Simple Stupid. From what I could see initially, they focused their time on making everything work and worried a little less on how it looks. With this being a LAN focused card, I think this is the best way to go. There is nothing worse than having issues when it a tournament or even when trying to pack as much gaming as you can into a weekend away.

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I love that right along the top edge of the card there are only two things you see. You see a small “Compact” logo and then four massive heatpipes. Those heatpipes pull the heat away from the GPU and out along the heatsink to keep things running cool. Going off the view from under the card and the view of the end any space under the fan shroud that wasn’t needed for the fan to move is packed full of heatsink. The biggest hurdle to packing these powerful video cards into an ITX form factor isn’t really about fitting everything on a PCB, although that is a challenge too, it’s all about being able t keep things cool. Its obvious Sapphire took this serious. There is nearly the same amount of overall heatsink material as you would find in a full sized video card.

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To keep all of the heatsink cool Sapphire went with a full sized and fairly standard cooling fan. The other ITX cards use a special dual direction fan but Sapphire was able to keep things standard, using what looks to be a fan pulled from nearly any of their other cards.

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Sapphire extended the cooling vent on the PCI slot to take up an entire slot where the other ITX cards had a DVI port sharing that space. This means if you need two DVI connections you are going to have to get a little creative. You do still get one DVI connection, one HDMI, and two mini DisplayPort connections. I would personally prefer to have one HDMI and two DVI, but with the extremely slow move to DisplayPort it should hopefully help those of you who have already moved to it. The only problem is the pricing on monitors that support it, but hopefully that will come down.

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As usual Sapphire still went with a black PCB even though with so much packed into such a tight package you can hardly even see the PCB at all. On the off chance that your SFF build will leave the card visible it is a nice touch.

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I talked a little before about how everyone else uses a specific design on their Mini-ITX cards and Sapphire went their own direction. First things first, for clarity, Asus was the first company to basically create this market. MSI followed up later with their variation that looked basically the same except with their dragon design on the front. As you can see with the original Asus card next to the Sapphire card, not only did they go a different direction in styling, but they managed to go with a more standard fan and heatsink design. I can’t wait until testing to see how they compare.

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A few of you might still be wondering what a Mini-ITX video card is. Well below are photos of the Sapphire ITC Compact installed in my Lunchbox 3. As you can see, there isn’t room for a video card any longer than the motherboards width. Sapphire managed to pack the R9 285 into the same space that Asus did with the GTX 670 and 760 and MSI with the R9 270 and GTX 760. While it is a tight fit, the ITX Compact was designed specifically to fit into cases like this. As I mentioned before the power cable being placed on the end does make going any smaller than this width wise basically impossible though.

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Our Test Rig and Procedures

Our Test Rig

CPU

Intel i7-3960X

Memory

Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM Quad Channel  (4x4GB)

Motherboard

Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard 

Cooling

Intel Active Thermal Solution RTS2011LC

Power Supply

Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU

Storage

Kingston Hyper X 120 SSD

Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive 

Case

High Speed PC Test Bench

Our Testing Procedures

Bioshock Infinite

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Bioshock Infinite on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, FXAA turned on, Ultra Texture detail, 16x Aniso Texture Filtering, Ultra Dynamic Shadows, Normal Postprocessing, Light Shafts on, Ambient Occlusion set to ultra, and the Level of Detail set to Ultra as well. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.

Tomb Raider

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Tomb Raider on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, Exclusive Fullscreen turned on, Anti-Aliasing set to 2xSSAA, Texture Quality set to Ultra, Texture Aniso set to 16x Aniso, Hair Quality set to TressFX, Shadow set to Normal, Shadow Resolution on High, Ultra SSAO, Ultra Depth of Field, High Reflection quality, Ultra LOD scale, Post Processing On, High Precision RT turned on, and Tessellation is also turned on.  We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.

Hitman: Absolution

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Hitman: Absolution on the “Xtreme” quality setting other than the MSAA setting is turned down from 8x to 2x. That setting puts the resolution at 1920x1080, MSAA is set to 2x, Texture Quality is set to High, Texture Aniso is set to 16x, Shadows are on Ultra, SSA is set to high, Global Illumination is turned on, Reflections are set to High, FXAA is on, Level of Detail is set to Ultra, Depth of Field is high, Tessellation is turned on, and Bloom is set to normal. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above, except on the “high” setting.

Sleeping Dogs

Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Sleeping Dogs on the “Xtreme” quality setting. That means our resolution is set to 1920x1080, Anti-Aliasing is set to Extreme, Texture Quality is set to High-Res, Shadow Quality is High, Shadow Filter is set to high, SSAO is set to High, Motion Blur Level is set to High, and World Density is set to Extreme. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.

F1 2013

We use the built in benchmark for F1 2013. We set our resolution to 1920x1080 and then use the “Ultra” setting.

Total War: Shogun 2

Direct X11 Benchmark High setting 1080p

Crysis 2

Using Adrenaline Crysis 2 benchmark.  1080p, 4x Anti-Aliasing, DX11, Laplace Edge Detection Edge AA, on the Times Square map, with hi res textures turned on.

Sniper V2 Elite

1920 x 1080 resolution, graphics detail set to ultra

Dirt Showdown

1920 x 1080 resolution, 4x MSAA multisampling, Vsync off, Shadows: ultra; Post Process: High; Night Lighting: High; Vehicle Reflections: Ultra; Ambient Occlusion: Ultra; Water: high; Objects: Ultra; Trees: Ultra; Crowd: Ultra; Ground Cover: High.

Metro Last Light

Using the included benchmark tool. The settings are set to 1920x1080, DirectX 11, quality is set to very high, Texture filtering is untouched at 4x, and motion blue is set to normal. SSAA is unselected, PhysX is unselected, Tessellation is off. We run through scene D6 three times to get an average score.

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Tested using the “Very High” setting at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440

3DMark

The same goes for the most current version of 3DMark using the Fire Strike benchmark in both normal and extreme settings

Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0

Using the “Extreme” preset

Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 heat testing

We run through Unreal Heaven using the “Extreme” preset for 30 minutes to test in game cooling performance.

Power Usage

Using Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0, we get our “load” power usage number from the peak power usage during our test. We get our numbers from a Kill-A-Watt connected to the test benches power cord.

Noise Testing

Our Noise testing is done using a decibel meter 3 inches away from the video card on the bottom/fan side of the card. We test an idle noise level and then to get an idea of how loud the card will get if it warms all the way up we also turn the fan speed up to 100% and test again. The 100% test isn’t a representation of typical in game noise levels, but it will show you how loud a card can be if you run it at its highest setting or if it gets very hot.

 


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.

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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!

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1080p In-Game

At the end of the day, assuming there aren’t any heat or power issues the numbers that matter the most are in game performance numbers right? With 1920x1080 being the most popular resolution it is important that the ITX Compact perform well at that resolution, in as many games as possible. To test that I ran the card through 10 different games (11 if you count the Thief results in the next section) turned up to their highest possible settings to see how well it could perform. Keep in mind that in most of these games you could turn a few things like AA down and still get similar quality with even better numbers, but I like to look at a worse case scenario. So out of the 10 games, I saw well over 60 FPS on 9/10. In some of those cases I saw numbers twice as fast, pushing up to 121 FPS. The one game that didn’t perform was still over 30 FPS, a number that most consider to be playable. More importantly its important to note that that same test required an R9 290 or a GTX 780 Ti to pull above 60 FPS, so we can’t fault the R9 285 too much.

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1440p In-Game

Like I mentioned before, most people are playing at or below 1080p, but with monitors starting to break into 4k I have started to test at higher resolutions as well, especially with 1440p monitors dropping in price so much. While I don’t expect the ITX Compact to handle the higher resolution as well as 1080p, I still ran it through our testing just to see where it landed. In the end it was a mixed bag of nuts. In Bioshock we still saw over 60 FPS but the rest of the games dropped down near 30 FPS. Frankly this is still better than I would have expected and not far off from what the R9 290 and GTX 780 did in their testing as well. As usual, Thief through me off with its 1080p and 1440p numbers coming out exactly the same.

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Cooling, Noise, and Power

As impressive as the performance numbers are, it is all for nothing if the ITX Compact pulls more power than any SFX power supply can handle or if it puts out more heat than any small form factor case can handle. Because of that I ran it through our standard tests on our testbench then when I was done I went back to Lunchbox 3 and tested to see how well it performed in the enclosed space as well.

Starting with power consumption it performed surprisingly well. At idle the entire test bench pulled a total of 192 watts, almost the lowest number I have ever seen at idle. Keep in mind this is all done with a high TDP 6 core CPU with water cooling where in a SFF build you would most likely be pulling even less power. Under load I saw a peak of 385 watts, 10 watts less than the MSI GTX 760 and 18 watts less than the Asus GTX 670. This still keeps us in the upper range of what our Silverstone SFX PSU can handle, but we have yet to have an issue with them over the last two years of use. Silverstone is talking about bringing even higher wattage models out any time now as well if you are worried.

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For noise the ITX Compact fell on the low to mid area of the charts overall. This was spot on for the MSI ITX card under load. At idle it was slightly higher, but not enough to worry about. At 50% fan speed, we saw a few more decibels as well. You have to expect some noise when you are trying to cool a fast card with a single fan, but I doubt there will be any more noise than the other ITX cards in real world use. Depending on the cooling performance, it might even be less noise if the card rarely has to spin up as high as the other cards.

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On the open-air testbench, I ran the ITX Compact through the Unreal Heaven benchmark to see how much things warmed up. Shockingly I saw a peak temperature of 71 degrees, a number that would be average for a normal card, but is 6 degrees better than the next coolest ITX video card. Like I said before, packing that much heat into a small video card can be tough, sapphire did a great job handling it. So the more important test was how well did it stay cool in our small build? Well running the same test I saw a peak of 73 degree’s. Mind you, with the other two cards I would sometimes have to take the side panel off at LANs to give them extra cooling to keep things from overheating. The Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285 shouldn’t have that issue at all.

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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. 

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #35662 12 Sep 2014 21:08
Some of you had the chance to check this card out at the LAN, Chad even was able to game on it all weekend. Now check out the official test results!

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