Club3D Radeon HD 7850 royalKing 2GB Graphics Card Review

As mentioned earlier on, this is the first card we’ve seen from Club3D in a long time, and due to that, we had high hopes, based off the last card we saw from them, but frankly feel that we have a bit of a sour taste left in our mouths, and it mainly comes down to the cooler.

The royalKing series are meant to implement both a pre-factory overclock and the CoolStream design, yet the only benefit that we see here is from the overclock. The 50MHz overclock showed us some really strong numbers, that crept closer and closer to the 7870 performance, and in some cases, saw this card only falling a few FPS behind in certain tests and benchmarks.

In terms of the benchmark numbers, this card exceeded our expectations, and shows that with a little further overclock from the user, you could have a value card, that can outperform the 7870 in a variety of tests, and hopefully this is where the cooler would show more of a benefit overall, as we didn’t really see much of advantage from the cooler, and that’s quite a sad moment for us, and obviously for Club3D too. Luckily the graphical performance does make up for the unsavoury performance that the cooler left us with, so at least that’s one point to Club3D.

In terms of price, we find the Club3D 7850 not booming with availability in the UK, and due to that, we could only find one store retailing this particular card at around the £200 mark, which is around £25 more expensive than offerings from the likes of Sapphire with their 7850 OC. Also bearing in mind, that a 7870 can also be picked up for around £225. This will certainly leave the consumer with a lot of choices, based on their budget, and if they have any allegiance to any particular brand.

We’re big fans of the 7800 series of graphics cards, as they do offer value for money, but this one doesn’t quite fall under this category, until you look at the sheer performance, which does make up for things somewhat, but the cooler takes some of the good and turns it into the bad.

This is one of the trickiest conclusions I’ve ever had to write, because I’m torn with this card, between the cooler, the pricing and the overall performance when looking at the benchmarks, and have to make an educated decision on what the general consumer is going to want and need. With that in mind, we’re happy to award this card with the Extreme Performance Award, due to how close the performance was to a reference 7870, and the true potential that lies within the card, especially if you team it up with overclocking software, such as MSI Afterburner or Sapphire TriXX tweaking utility.