The video board is called Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce

Nov 7, 2014 09:19 GMT  ·  By

You might think that the AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics card was already strong enough at 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM capacity, but that doesn't mean that the one actually making the cards agrees with you. Club3D definitely doesn't.

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 980 graphics card, it basically offered the world something that was better than everything AMD had, except dual-GPU boards.

Currently, NVIDIA is preparing a GeForce GTX 980 with 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM instead of 4 GB, but AMD has decided to one-up it and do it faster.

While it was at it, it tweaked the clocks of the card so that the performance disadvantage narrowed even further, maybe even disappearing.

Well, technically, it's AMD's OEM partners that are modifying the specifications of their cards, but that's just as well.

Behold the Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce

The name is pretty odd actually. Gb means gigabit, but Club 3D has decided to use it as an abbreviation for gigabyte instead, which would normally be spelled GB. Either way, be sure to know that this card has 8 GB of GDDR5 video random access memory.

The other specs are pretty good too, with a GPU clock of 1,030 MHz instead of 1 GHz, and the memory speed of 5.5 GHz instead of 5 GHz. The AMD Hawaii GPU has 2,816 stream processors, in case you forgot.

Then there's the Dual BIOS capability, which lets you revert to factory settings if you manually overclock the board too much.

Speaking of which, do be careful how overboard you go in that regard. While the CoolStream cooler is nice and all, with five heatpipes made of copper and even a backplate, it still has limits by virtue of using air.

Wait until a water block of closed-loop liquid cooler is released for it before you let the dogs of clock tweaking loose upon it.

Other features provided by the Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce include PowerTine XDMA, Mantle API support, True Audio, and of course, 4K resolution support. You could even say that 4K support was the whole point.

Availability and pricing

The Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce graphics card hasn't been given a price, but it will probably ship for around six hundred dollars / euro. Shipments should begin through various retailers in short order, if they aren't live yet. Direct competition will be provided by 8 GB boards from other AMD OEMs, like MSI.

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Cliub 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce (3 Images)

Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce
Club 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce, I/O panelClub 3D R9 290X 8Gb royalAce, side view
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