ASUS stirred up the enthusiast community recently with its dual-GeForce GTX 285 accelerator that for the first time, lets four fully-loaded G200b GPUs function in quad-SLI. Perhaps responding to it, EVGA rolled out the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 Classified (01G-P3-1190-AR), the first single-GPU GeForce accelerator to support 4-way SLI (or Quad-SLI). With a small but significant number of SLI-compatible motherboards with four PCI-Express x16 slots already out there, EVGA hopes to cash in with its newest product.

The GeForce GTX 285 Classified sticks to reference NVIDIA clock speeds of 648/1242 MHz (core/memory), while leaving it to the user to overclock it, by providing a number of design enhancements. It also sticks to having 1 GB of memory. To begin with, this card features a full 8-phase digital-PWM power design, and makes use of high-grade components such as film capacitors. It draws power from three 6-pin PCI-E power connectors. Voltage measure points for VPLL, DRAM VDDQ, DRAM VDD, and VGPU are nucleated in a convenient location for easy measurements. The card supports EVGA's EVbot device that provides control over the card's parameters in the hands of the user. The EVbot can be directly plugged in to the card. Finally, the card supports 4-way SLI. At this point what its SLI bridge looks like is not known, but hopefully it's provided with the card or the EVGA's newest motherboard. It has been listed on the company store for US $379.99, currently on pre-order.