Club3D HD7970 RoyalAce Graphics Card Review

1. Introduction2. Club3D HD7970 RoyalAce Graphics Card3. Club3D HD7970 RoyalAce Graphics Card (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)10. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p)11. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)12. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)13. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p)14. Gaming: Dirt ShowDown (5760x1080)15. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080)16. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (5760x1080) DX1117. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

The winter months can be depressing, with saturating rain and icy snow pervading dark evenings, so why not spend some money on a new graphics card for yourself, tuck up tight in bed and game on a big high definition television set? Club3D might have the answer in the shape of their HD7970 RoyalAce graphics card, featuring enhanced clock speeds, lower noise emissions and proprietary cooling system.

It won't be easy for them however, they are facing stiff competition from the likes of Sapphire, Asus, VTX3D and MSI. Today we answer the big question, is their HD7970 ‘RoyalAce' worth the money?

We have only reviewed one Club3D card (HD7870 Royal King) before and I was not impressed with the cooling system at all, it was woefully inadequate and we simply couldn't recommend the solution. After the review went live Club3D were not happy, however to their credit they have submitted another card for us to review – their high end HD7970 RoyalAce.

The Club3D company policy is based around a ‘playing card' concept and many of their discrete solutions are named after the ‘royal cards'. We have the RoyalKing, The RoyalQueen and the Jokercard. While corny, it does distinguish their products from the plethora of competitor custom solutions.

Product	Club3D HD7970 RoyalAce	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	1100mhz	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	140.8 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	33.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,500mhz	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	6.0 GBps	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	288 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

The Club3D HD7970 is clocked faster than the reference card, at 1,100mhz. The 3GB of memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective) and is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface. The HD7970 has 32 ROPS, 2,048 unified shaders and is built on the 28nm manufacturing process.

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