Cancelled AMD Radeon R9 285X Pictured

The AMD Radeon R9 285X was originally designed to launch around one month after the R9 285 and provide a decent performance boost. Unfortunately, this never materialised and the product was officially cancelled. The reasoning behind this remains unclear but it’s most likely down to the Tonga’s disappointing power efficiency compared to Tahiti. As a result, the R9 285X’s extra performance would highlight Tonga’s power draw even more and lead to negative publicity. Despite never being released, the R9 285X has been pictured by ZealotKi11er on the Overclock.net forums. This is a wonderful revelation and it’s great to see the card in all its glory.

Judging from the PCB image, it seems the C765 board was supposed to employ a 5+1 phase power design and use 6+8 PCI-E configuration. According to GPU-Z, the card has 3GB GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit interface. Furthermore, the product has 32 ROPs, a 1002MHz core clock and a memory clock of 1375MHz.

Here we can see a screenshot detailing the R9 R285X’s performance in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark:

This is an unexpected turn of events and I’m wondering how the user ever managed to obtain this cancelled product. Perhaps, it was sent to an engineer, system integrator or reviewer to try out ahead of the launch period.