Sapphire R9-285 ITX Compact OC Edition – Review

A Closer Look

As its name suggest the Sapphire ITX Compact R9-285 OC is a small graphics card, one designed for those looking for a card to fit into a small mini-ITX enclosure. It measures up at a diminutive 171mm

The front and rear show a bit of info about the cards features, such as the 2GB of GDDR5 the card has, the Overclocked aspect and the UEFI Bios option.

The card comes with the usual driver disc and pamphlets. You also get a mini-displayport to full size displayport, DVI to VGA adaptor and a dual 6-pin to 8-pin cable as well.

The Sapphire ITX Compact R9-285 OC takes a single 8-pin cable, the port for which is located at the internal edge of the board.

Along the top, you can see the 4 large heat pipes which form part of the large cooling array and on the right is a switch that changes between the UEFI and standard BIOS modes of the card.

At the bottom you can see the end of each heat pipe, and a large metal plate that spans the card and fits over various parts to improve cooling performance.

The rear of the card has connections for most displays with two mini display ports, a DVI port and a HDMI port.

I have to say that I like the design Sapphire have used for the  ITX Compact R9-285 OC as it looks very understated with a nice simple metal and plastic fan shroud. The cooling fan is 92mm in size and makes up most of the actual size of the card.

Just to give you a quick comparison to the card it was replacing. The MSI card underneath comes in at a huge by comparison 245mm in length.