Club3D RoyalQueen R9 270 review

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Read on Official website: BHT

Introduction

AMD has been releasing many new GPUs since October. Recently, they released the R9 270 and the more powerful R9 270X, dubbed "Curacao," despite the fact that they aren't strictly a new architecture, because they're based on the older Pitcairn architecture. Both GPUs feature the same specs as the HD7870, but they are a little tweaked overall. The R9*270 is more a replacement for the HD 7850, while the R9 270X replaces the HD 7870. The R9 270 should be available in the $170-190 price range, and offers very nice performance for budget gamers.

The R9 270 that Club3D sent us is member of the PokerSeries from the company: "With our new "PokerSeries" Club 3D offers a new level of special gamecards that delivers the best performance, newest features and best coolers. PokerSeries graphic cards present our highest demands".

Club3D's RoyalQueen R9 270 features a clockspeed of 955*MHz, which is a little higher then a retail R9 270. It needs only one 6-pin connector from the PSU, which is a welcome change, especially for those building in a smaller chassis. The powerconnector is situated on the end of the card like on most smaller cards. It has 3 video-outputs: 1 DVI-D, 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort that can be connected to an MST Hub from Club3D that supports 3 full HD 1080P outputs.*

Club 3D sent us a little text about their company and what they're trying to achieve in 2014!

Club 3D is a leading supplier of high performance & high quality graphics cards.* Headquartered in The Netherlands, Club 3D was established in 1997 by computer enthusiasts.* In 2001, Club 3D became the first ATI Technologies’ Add-in-Board partner to launch products into the market.* Since 2001, Club 3D have developed Graphics Cards based on all leading GPU Manufactures.* Club 3D have been focused on providing products to the enthusiasts market.* This market demand the best performance, features and quality from graphics cards.* For this reason we launched the Poker Series of cards to offer the Best Performance, features and quality for those who demand only the BEST!* The Poker Series offers the enthusiast custom PCB designs, Club 3D’s CoolStream cooling solution which improves heat dissipation and reduces fan noise for improved performance and reliability.* In 2014, we will continue to introduce exciting new products into the Poker Series line-up!* Club 3D also offers variety of other products ranging from PSU, Cables to PC accessories.* Club 3D was a pioneer in the MST Hub market and will introduce more innovative accessories product in 2014 and beyond.* Please stay tuned for future news and reviews of Club 3D products on Blackholetec.com*

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Product Showcase

Club3D sent us a RoyalQueen R9 270 and an additional MST Hub that we will review shortly.

As the pictures show, Club3D is going hard with their Poker theme on this card and its packaging. The box contains the usual suspects; a driver disc also containing utilities (like RoyalFlush) and manuals; a crossfire bridge, a quick installation guide in several languages, a door hanger and, of course, the GPU itself.

The cooler on the card hasn't changed much from previous cards, but that's not a complaint, since its design and the simplicity is still effective as ever, with a fan in the middle of the card and an open-sides design to the shroud (not like the blower design from AMD).*We'll see how it performs in the review.

Testing Methods

For the process of these tests, we'll be running the testing environments at 1920x1080 at the maximum available graphical settings. We did plan*to perform some tri-monitor benchmarks, but the hardware wasn't available in time for this review, but we'll be sure to include such tests in our future reviews. For these tests, the card will be benched at both stock and overclocked settings, to give our readers and idea what this card can achieve if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get a little dirty.

For the comparison, we use cards from the same price range or a little higher from both AMD and Nvidia, to show how it compares.

Games and benchmarks that we used for this review:

• 3DMark: FireStrike
• Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Sleeping Dogs
• Black Ops II
• Assassin's Creed III​
• Hitman: Absolution
• Battlefield 3
• Far Cry 3
• Metro: Last Night
• Saints Row IV

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Test System

Our test system contains an older i7 2600K overclocked to 4.7GHz to ensure it still performs well against the newer CPUs.

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Overclocking

Overclocking this GPU can be a little confusing. Club3D provides us with RoyalFlush, their own overclocking utility. Despite our efforts, this utility didn't seem to work for us. We spent some time trying to diagnose what was hindering our overclocking efforts, but every time we changed the clockspeed through RoyalFlush, the changes wouldn't take. The voltage slider didn't seem to work either.

After struggling with RoyalFlush for a few hours, we ultimately switched to AMD's Catalyst for the overclocking, and just avoided modifying the GPU's voltage. Despite the issues, we ended up with a nice stable overclock on the stock voltage, by simply increasing the core clock to 1050MHz and we increased the memory speed to 1500MHz.

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Overclocking Profile: CPU= 4700MHz, GPU= 1050MHz/1500MHz (and RAM=*1866Mhz CL9)



3DMark 2013: FireStrike

"Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today's high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today."

3DMark is arguably the most popular 3D graphics benchmark available. It measures the gaming performance of your GPU in all ways possible. We picked out FireStrike because that's the most stressful test.

The R9 270 ends up slower than the older HD 7870 in this test. However, the R9 270 is meant as replacement for the HD 7850 and we can see that it's almost 1000 points faster! With a small overclock we were able to beat the HD 7870 GHz edition and we came very close to the HD 7950 Boost.


Read the second post for the second part of the review

 

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The slightly overclocked R9 270 from Club3D is able to beat both the HD 7870 and the HD 7850 in this test. Also the GTX 660 from the competition is slower. The more expensive cards, I'm talking about the HD 7950 Boost and GTX 660 Ti, are still faster. Even when the R9 270 is overclocked, it isn't quite able to match the power of these cards. Then again, Skyrim isn't the biggest, and most power-hungry game out nowadays, so why not move on to our next game?


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Far Cry 3

Here we can see how demanding of a game Far Cry 3 really is. The R9 270 isn't quite strong enough to offer that buttery-smooth gameplay that gamers crave on ultra settings. The difference between the HD 7950 and the R9 270 is much more noticeable here. With more streamprocessors, the HD 7950 is able to handle the game's particle effects much better overall. Overclocking the R9 270 unfortunately only bought us another few frames, and still not enough to give an enjoyable gaming experience on ultra.

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Battlefield 3

In this round, we see almost the same results as before; The R9 270 is able to beat the older HD 7870 GHz and HD 7850, but is still slower than the more expensive*GTX 660 Ti and HD 7950 Boost. The Club3D R9 270 scores an average of around 60 FPS on ultra, which is great news for gamers. You can further smooth things out by overclocking for an additional 6 FPS in this case.



Hitman: Absolution

The newest game from the long-running Hitman series shows us some nice graphics at the maximum settings. We used the game's built-in benchmark for this test.

This is one of the games that is clearly optimized for AMD hardware, seen by the GTX 660 Ti scoring lower than the HD 7870 GHz. Even though it's optimized for AMD, the R9 270still struggles with the details and the card isn't quite able to even manage a reliable 30 FPS. When overclocked, the 30FPS barrier has been broken and the game smoother.

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Sleeping Dogs

This game is quite stressful for the GPU and it can be used to test the max load temperature of your card.

Overall, the game ran pretty well, but it had some drops in FPS that made it a little unpleasant to play at times. Unsurprisingly, the R9 270 beats the older HD 7870, but it also gets a little closer to the GTX 660 Ti in this round. When overclocked, the little drops in FPS weren't as notable, and the game overall was more playable.


Metro: Last Light

We didn't manage to get results from the GTX 660 Ti for this round of testing, but there are enough alternatives that a wide range of test hardware was still available. It seems like the R9 270 ran the game well and we didn't feel any notable FPS lags during gameplay. Overclocking brought us an extra 2 FPS reastically not enough to justify the extra heat and noise though.

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Assassin's Creed III

Assassin's Creed III is know to be a little more optimized in favor of Nvidia cards, so it's likely we'll see a little balance pushed in that direction compared to other tests.

The Club3D card comes close to the more expensive HD 7950 this time. The GTX 660 also manages to close the gap a little. This test shows the competition a little faster in this game, but the game still ran fine on all cards in the test, with a little stutter at the low end of the charts.


Saints Row IV

For this round, we only have tests from the R9 270 and the more expensive HD 7950 Boost, but this game is well optimized for current and recent generation GPUs throughout the mid-high price ranges.

As you can see in the results, you don't need anything more then the R9 270 to run this smooth at maximum settings. And in fact, the R9 270 only scores little slower than the HD 7950 Boost in this test.

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Black Ops II

Again in this test we unfortunately didn't manage our full testing hardware range, but the Call of Duty series is again, like Saints Row, quite well built for those that don't live on teh bleeding edge of technology.

Interestingly, the HD 7950 scores notably higher than the R9 270 in this test, though both cards manage average framerates higher than most gamers will even experience due to Vsync capping to 60-120 FPS anyway.






Power Consumption

We used a UMP meter to accurately measure and monitor the total power consumption of our test system. The average power consumption from each test is displayed in the chart.

We only had results for the XFX HD 7950 DD Black Edition which is equal to an AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost edition.

The idle power consumption from the HD 7950 and R9 270 seem to be equal, but looking at the under-load consumption, the HD 7950 drains 55 Watts more on average than the R9 270. 258 Watts at full load is very good*for the processing performance the card pushed out in return. When overclocked, it consumes a little more power, but remains impressive.




Noise

Each different GPU manufacturer has their own methods of attempting to reduce and eliminate noise from fans while also managing to keep the heatsinks cool enough to keep the GPU itself from slowly melting. These efforts always have varying results, so how did Club3D do with their attempts? Our measurements are taken from 20cm away from the case. We also underclocked our i7 2600K and removed its fans to have as little ambient noise as possible from other components in the test PC.

We again used our XFX HD 7950 DD Black Edition to compare the Club3D RoyalQueen*R9 270 with. The Club3D RoyalQueen R9 270's fan is impressively quiet when kept under 50% speed. And, unless you overclock it, you'll likely never need any more airflow than that 50% pushes.


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Temperature

Even despite the fact that we have an aftermarket cooler on the HD 7950, the R9 270 manages to beat the temperature war by a notable margin, even when overclocked.




Conclusion

Overall, we can conclude that the Club3D PokerSeries are very nice cards. The AMD R9 270 is comparable (though still superior, due to memory speeds) to an HD 7870 GHz Edition in terms of performance. The HD 7850 that replaces the R9 270 is much slower and competes against the even higher clocked edition from Club3D, the RoyalQueen R9 270.

If we look at the overclocking features the Club3D has to offer, we have to say that Club3D failed with their program in this review, since the included*program just didn't work for us at all, as noted earlier in this review. However, the program's monitoring program did work pretty well. Maybe it was just a problem with our card in particular or it was a problem with our drivers or other software. When we started overclocking in Catalyst, we were impressed by the clockspeed that the card could achieve at the stock voltage.

After the overclocking part, we can look at the thermals and acoustics of the card. This is the area where the card suprised us the most. Stock or overclocked it didn't matter, the card stayed cool. For the noise, we can't complain either, it was barely audible at load. When overclocked, it became a little louder but certainly not annoying. These two things are scored under design of the card, another aspect of the design being the card's looks; As a Poker-Style oriented card we can say that the looks are basic and simple, which makes the card so fascinating! However, the simplicity makes it look a little angular. The company didn't change the design all that much with this new generation because they believe that it can offer good results in terms of cooling and acoustics. We agree to this, for design, we can't give any drawbacks!

For the power consumption, we can also say that this part was okay. It consumes roughly 60 Watts less than a Radeon HD 7950 Boost, and at idle it consumes almost nothing. Even when overclocked, there were no issues with power consumption.

The price of the card here in Belgium (at time of writing) is only 155 Euros, which makes it the cheapest non-retail R9 270 currently on the market. Without a doubt, this card is a smart buy for anyone currently in the market.

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Performance = 17.5/20

GPU performance in price range = 10/10, Real GPU performance = 7.5/10

Power Consumption = 4.5/5

Overclocking = 4/5

Design = 24/25

Acoustics = 10/10, Cooling = 10/10, Looks = 4/5

Value = 9.5/10

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Notes: An effective design: silent and cool, the cheapest non-retail R9 270 and*best performance in price range, but*the overclocking software that came with the card doesn't work for us.

We decided to give the*Club3D RoyalQueen R9 270*a gold award, especially in this price range!

 

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Sorry about the Big sizes of pictures, stars in the text and other bugs. It has been created in html code and I just used a converter to make it a little easier to post it decently over here. Will have a look into the lay out later

 

[Shane]

Fantastic review,and nicely laid out..thank you for doing this Smileman its greatly appreciated.