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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.
