Club3D R9 290 Royal Ace Review

Club3D R9 290 Royal Ace Review

Conclusion

It’s always nice to review something which builds on the good work of a previous generation of products, and especially when it has an unexpected side bonus too.

Starting with the looks, it’s clear that the lovely Coolstream cooler Club3D used last time has been refined but without changing it massively. The metal shroud is sturdy, with only some crisp white lettering and the red Club logo breaking up the swathe of black. It’s nice to see a back plate and the addition of a club cutout only adds to the sense of quality. We’re sure that you’ll like it as much as we do and, as you saw on page two, it looks even nicer when installed in a system of complimentary colours.

The main change has been the move to three fans. Often the extra fans give out extra noise, just because even the quietest fan when multiplied, multiplies the noise output. Thankfully we can report that the Royal Ace is actually pretty quiet, even under heavy loading. Most impressively the cooling performance is spectacular, with the card comfortably cooler than anything else. When running Unigine Valley at massive resolutions to still see only 73° has to be considered a win for the Club3D card.

Speaking of performance, unquestionably the R9 290 Royal Ace is hugely impressive. It doesn’t matter if you’re running at the near-default resolution of 1920×1080, or up to 2560×1440, the Royal Ace gets it done in a quality manner. Actually the higher resolution tests ended up being the most jaw-dropping aspect of our time with the R9 290 RA. Regularly it was out-performing 290X’s, which are more expensive and we’d expect them to give far higher performance. As it is the Club3D card ends up being in the hunt in every test.

With a glorious cooler, great looks, and some seriously high-end performance, the Club3D R9 290 Royal Ace is an easy winner of our OC3D Gold Award.

   

Thanks to Club3D for supplying the R9 290 Royal Ace for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.