Over the last couple of days, various vendors have unveiled their 300-series AMD Radeon graphics cards, and Club3D is certainly taking part. The Dutch firm, which exclusively makes AMD graphics cards with a focus on value and reliability, built five cards for the 300-series, with models ranging from the R7 360 up to the R9 390X.
The R7 360 card in its arsenal comes with a compact design and a simple single-fan cooler. The Tobago GPU is clocked at 1060 MHz, which is wired to 2 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 128-bit memory interface and runs at an effective speed of 6.6 GHz.
A step higher, but still part of the R7-series, is the Radeon R7 370 RoyalQueen. This card ups the ante a little bit, featuring a larger single-fan cooler that uses a handful of copper heatpipes to distribute the heat generated by the GPU throughout the heatsink. The GPU is clocked at up to 985 MHz, and wired to 2 GB of memory over a 256-bit memory interface, which runs at 5.7 GHz effective.
As the lower-tier card in the R9 series, the R9 380 4 GB RoyalQueen offers high-end gaming at a very high performance-per-dollar price point. The CoolStream cooler uses a heatsink design with heatpipes and has two fans for airflow. The GPU clocks in at 980 MHz and is wired to 4 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit memory interface. This memory runs at an effective speed of 5.9 GHz.
Second-to-best, the R9 390 8 GB RoyalQueen is the first card in the series to feature Club3D's triple-fan CoolStream cooler. This cooler is also no stranger to heatpipes, and follows the Club3D styling with a bent and painted aluminum shroud. Additionally, it also has a backplate to cover the rear end of the card, which should help a wee bit with cooling, but also make the card look a lot better when installed in your system. The GPU is clocked at 1010 MHz, with the 8 GB of memory running at an effective speed of 6.0 GHz over a 512-bit memory interface.
The R9 390X 8 GB RoyalQueen is based on the same design as that of its non-X variant, but its GPU runs at 1060 MHz. The memory interface, board design and cooler are all the same.
From the looks of the boards, Club3D has stuck to using the reference design, changing out only the coolers and adding backplates. That's intriguing, because so far we've seen few vendors that stuck to reference board designs for most of its lineup.
Adhering to reference board designs doesn't appear to be hurting reliability, either. Having had a look at Club3D's RMA testing center in the Netherlands, I was surprised at how small it was. I asked whether this was the testing office for the Netherlands or Europe, to which a Club3D representative responded that it was the global testing center, where all of the broken cards come (with a big smile on his face).
Do note that despite being simpler cards on the hardware side, on the software side they will have all the features that all other cards have. If you want to use FreeSync, or the new APIs such as Vulkan, LiquidVR or DirectX 12, you will of course still be able to.
Overall, Club3D's lineup isn't going to take the cake for having the most extravagant features, but that's okay. If you're just looking for a simple version of a 300-series card without all the gimmicks, Club3D's cards will likely be your most affordable option.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
