The Club 3D royalAce is a damn fine card of that there can be no arguing. It's main problem though is that the latest cards from NVIDIA have put the HD7970 in the shade. We dearly wanted the royalAce to claw back some lost ground however as our results have shown, the GTX780 and perhaps even the GTX770 which is more or less an overclocked GTX680 in disguise, surpass the royalAce HD7970. Sadly, this put the Club 3D card in a difficult position. Clearly, this is not Club 3D's fault however with AMD clinging to past glories, NVIDIA have been squireling away and released some new awesome cards, pushing the envelope and raising the bar even higher which unfortunately, even with it's 'super overclock', the royalAce cannot equal. While today's sample may have had a very slight edge in raw FPS, the GTX770 still had the upper hand when comparing gaming experience.

This isn't to say the royalAce is a bad card, it isn't. If you are a fan of the red team then we say go buy it because you won't be disappointed. As far as HD7970's go, this is one of the best. It is very fast, powerful and can handle any game out there with relative ease. There are a few caveats to add to this without comparing it to NVIDIA cards.

Firstly, with regard to outright performance, the raw FPS figures are as you would expect very good. There are some problems, perhaps due to the on-going driver issues, with regard to frame time response rates. Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 show some pretty poor results which means that you may see or at least feel some jerkiness in your gameplay should you opt for this card, especially at higher resolutions with additional filtering applied. While this is true of most graphics cards given the demand these games place on them, the HD7970 seems to perform worse than most. Were this not bad enough, the card is also not the quietest we have had through our doors. The fan noise is bearable but worse is the capacitor squeal which is clearly noticeable and can begin to grate on you after long periods of gaming. IF you have a moderate to loud case fan setup you won't hear the cards fans and maybe not even the squeal but should we have to rely on other components to drown out the drone of the cards fans or the high pitched whine - we think not.



The cost of the royalAce is comparable to other custom cooled HD7970's available at around the £338 mark however, at this price you are firmly in the same territory as the GTX770 which as our tests confirmed, appears to be the better performing card. So unless you must have an AMD GPU, the GTX770 may be the better buy even if it is re-hashed 'old tech'. When you consider the HD7970 is now 18 months old, Club 3D have done the best they can with a card that is getting long in the tooth. We therefore look forward to what they can do with the 8000 family of GPUs rumoured to be released in Q4 2013. For now though, the royalAce is the only Ace in the pack if that pack of cards carries the AMD label.

To summarise:
If you are averse to the new cards from NVIDIA then the Club 3D royalAce HD7970 makes for a suitable alternative but if you have no allegiance, we would find it hard to recommend this card over a GTX770/780.