Club3D shows off upcoming custom GPU back plates at i49

Club3D, the AMD graphics card partner that has been looking to get even more competitive on its GPU pricing with the 13Series of cut-price graphics cards, was at i49 this weekend with the Kitguru team, showing off not only those simple boxed cards, but a new bit of in-case bling that might turn a few enthusiast's heads.

Backing plates, if a card has them at all, are usually just plane black metal – on the more expensive cards – or part of a big plastic shroud on a cheaper air cooled version. If you replace your cooling to water however, chances are the back of your card will simply have a big metal X on it, if that. While most gamers don't care about such styling faux pas, enthusiasts, by their very nature take all these things into consideration.

And that's what Club3D is hoping to tap into with its custom backing plate designs. The one on show at i49 was this quite striking black backing-plate, featuring a club symbol cut out in the middle.

My shot of this came out too dark, so I cribbed this from the Club3D Facebook. Thank god someone knows how to use a camera.

This will be just the first of several designs and colour options made available and should fit in nicely with the classic looking red PCBs being used on a lot of Club3D cards.

According to the attending Club3D PR man – who's name I forget… so sorry dude – he hopes these will be priced around £10 on release. There's also been a lot of praise for these coming in from Pakistan, apparently a growing market for high-end Club3D parts. 

He also showed me the recently debuted Multi Stream Transport hub, which allows for the splitting of a single video stream into three. This makes eyefinity on six or more monitors a doddle for anyone running a supremely high end setup. Or perhaps just something that schools could make use of for sharing around notes and images. 

Kitguru Says: Look out overclockers. You're going to have competition from the middle-east soon enough.

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