Club3D HD7870 Royal King 2GB Graphics Card Review

AMD's HD7870 has proven successful with the enthusiast audience throughout 2012, delivering solid frame rate performance at a reasonable sub £250 price point. This is the first time we have reviewed a Club3D product however we do expect certain results from a HD7870 solution.

We spend plenty of time analysing the latest Sapphire graphics cards, and they consistently produce class leading enthusiast grade twin fan coolers. The last card we reviewed for Sapphire was their HD7870 FleX Edition, which earned our highest award. It was extremely quiet (31.9dBa under load) and overclocked to 1,200mhz without a hitch.

This has been a repeating pattern for most of 2012 and our readers are by now very confident that Sapphire will release a quality design, regardless of the price point. We certainly are.

We have no concerns with the Club3D HD7870 2GB Royal King frame rate performance. The additional 50mhz core clock increase ensures that the solution manages to outperform AMD's reference card at all times. The card also overclocks to a high level, peaking at 1,180mhz which translates into noticeable real world performance gains.

Unfortunately we have some major concerns with the cooler that Club3D have adopted for this particular design.

The company are using a modest cooler with only two heatpipes, and while it is a direct touch contact design, the base is not copper and the single fan has to spin very high to maintain a tolerable thermal curve.

When gaming, we recorded almost 40 dBa from the cooler, which is one of the weakest results yet from a modified HD7870 solution. When stressed further in Furmark, the single fan spins to 96% of the rated maximum, to 3,600 rpm. At this level the card emits 46.4dBa.

This is painful and not a result I would expect from an ‘enhanced' HD7870. Temperatures recorded were 83c when gaming, and 93c under extended Furmark load. This is around 20c higher than the twin fan HD7870 cooler on the Sapphire FleX Edition.

Sadly this negates the benefits of using this card in a high performance media center. We like the small physical footprint, however I simply wouldn't tolerate this noise level in any of my systems. Club3D really did need to adopt a dual fan solution and increase the amount of copper heatpipes to improve the thermal transfer performance.

We have no pricing for the UK market yet, however we would expect this card to retail for around £230-£250 inc vat when it hits these shores. I really can't recommend the Club3D HD7870 Royal King in face of such stiff competition from the likes of HIS with their HD7870 ICEQ or Sapphire with their HD7870 Twin fan model.

We asked for another sample to verify the poor temperature performance and very high noise emissions but the company were unwilling after our review to send any us more samples. They were actually very aggressive in response which was rather disappointing. We deal regularly with companies such as Sapphire, VTX3D and XFX, and even when our reviews may highlight product weaknesses they are very keen to take constructive feedback on board and improve future product development if necessary.

Our first Club3D review may very well be the last, but we always need to be open, transparent and honest with our readers.

Pros:

• Good performance.
• overclocks well.
• very small physical size.

Cons:

• very loud under load.
• single fan.
• poor cooler design.

Kitguru says: If they had adopted a more substantial dual fan cooler then this would have performed a lot better, as it stands it offers poor value for money.

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