HD 7970 royalAce graphics card is special for its cooler, which is based on Cool Stream technology. Unlike reference cooling, where the fan is located towards the end of the card and blows through the card, Club3D opted for two fans that push air downwards, straight at the heatsink. As a result, some of the heat may be released inside the case so you might want to make sure your in-case airflow is adequate.

Both fans are connected to the same 4-pin power connector and the RPM can be regulated in Catalyst Control Centre.

The company used thick heatpipes that transfer heat to the farthest parts of the heatsink with ease. Due to the tall heatpipes, and the way they’re bent, the cooler is a few centimeters taller than the standard cooler. Still, although it exceeds the height of the PCB, even the most traditional of cases shouldn’t have problems fitting it inside. You can get a better idea of how tall they are when the card is viewed from the back.

Just like the reference card, the card uses one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector.

Three heatpipes go through the cooler but Club 3D made sure they’re bent in a way so as to provide five contact points.

You can see where the GPU touches the base, as well as the fact that the HD 7970’s GPU is rotated by 45 degrees. The cooler is held in place with four screws only, but we didn’t notice any instability or vibration.

The card has 3GB of Hynix memory, which we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on pretty much hall AMD and Nvidia cards. The memory is rated at 1500MHz and this card is no exception.

The I/O panel has one dual-link DVI, standard HDMI out and two mini DisplayPort outs.

HD 7970 royalAce comes with two CrossFire connectors, meaning that it’s possible to daisy chain up to four cards for some fierce CrossFireX muscle. Although the shroud hides the CrossFire connectors, it will not be a problem as CrossFire bridge connectors are flexible.

The Club 3D Radeon HD 7970 royalAce comes with a toggle switch. This switch allows you to switch between two separate BIOS versions, 1) factory defaults and 2) unprotected. The graphics card comes standard at 1050 MHz GPU clock speed with overclocking headroom up to 1.1GHz and beyond.