AMD's Radeon 7 series cards have been kicking around for a while at this point, so it's about time we got a look at what's coming next. Fortunately, Club3D is here to save the day, with its custom back plates (which we saw at i49 earlier this year) on the brand spanking new Radeon R9 280x and 270x PokerSeries cards.

The former of the cards comes in two flavours, the royalKing and royalQueen, with the only real difference being that the former has a 10 per cent bump to its clock speed, coming in at 1100MHz. Comparatively, the royalQueen is clocked at 1GHz on the nose, though both pack 2048 stream processors, 3GB of GDDR5 and a 384bit memory bus on the single PCB.

The 270X royalQueen is a little less hefty, with only 1280 stream processors, though it does have a decent clock speed of 1080MHz and come in 2GB or 4GB versions. Designed as a more cost effective solution than the beefed up royal couple, the 270X is said to be capable of playing all current and upcoming AA games with ease.

The entire R9 series is also able to make use of the upcoming Mantle architecture that AMD disclosed towards the end of September, potentially providing even more performance as the API is refined.

KitGuru Says: These cards should be landing today, supposedly around the sub $300 price point. Here's hoping as my old 5850 feels like its on its last legs. Screen flicker hooooo!

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