Club3D launched three cards in its HD 7970 Poker series – royalAce is the fastest (1050MHz GPU), followed by royalKing (975MHz GPU) while the slowest in the series is the royalQueen (925MHz GPU). All the  cards are special for the dual-fan cooling, which performed well on our tests.

Club3D produced an ace from its sleeve when it decided to strap the HD 7970 with special cooling, especially in the case of its highly overclocked HD 7970 royalAce SuperOverClock card. The cooler isn’t as quiet as the GTX 680’s, but it isn’t too loud either, which is more than we can say for AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition’s reference cooler that’s already drawn enough criticism in this respect.

Thanks to the 50 MHz higher GPU clock than that of the regular HD 7970 GHz Edition, the royalAce card beats the GTX 680 in most games.

If you’re the kind that obsesses over the power bill, then HD 7970 GHz Edition probably isn’t your cup of tea since the cards consume significantly more than reference HD 7970s. Additionally, performance-per-Watt ratio on high end graphics cards is something where Nvidia takes the cake, at least when it comes to the last generation of graphics.

In conclusion, the HD 7970 royalAce is definitely a card that any gamer wouldn’t say no to. Ultimately, our decision is well backed by our testing and we’re looking at one of the fastest single GPU graphics cards on the market, with a factory overclock, special cooling and further overclocking headroom.