Club3D HD 7850 Royal Queen 1 GB

Introduction

Not long ago, AMD released the HD 7800 Series, based on the company's Pitcairn silicon which uses the GCN shader architecture on a 28 nm process. HD 7850 provides great midrange capabilities beating the Radeon HD 6950 and the NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti.



Club3D has chosen a special memory configuration for its HD 7850 Royal Queen. Unlike the 2 GB found on the reference design and on most other HD 7850 cards, the Royal Queen uses just 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. This lets Club3D price its card at only $195, $35 cheaper than the reference design. At this point you are probably exclaiming, "1 GB! That'll never be enough for the latest titles at higher resolutions". Our testing will conclusively show whether this card has any chance of competing with offers in its market segment or whether it's just a big pile of fail.

HD 7850 Market Segment Analysis

	Radeon HD 6870	GeForce GTX 560	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	Radeon HD 6950	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7850	Club3D HD 7850 RoyalQueen	Radeon HD 7870	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 7950	GeForce GTX 670
Shader Units	1120	336	384	1408	480	1536	1024	1024	1280	512	1792	1344
ROPs	32	32	32	32	40	32	32	32	32	48	32	32
Graphics Processor	Barts	GF114	GF114	Cayman	GF110	Cayman	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	GF110	Tahiti	GK104
Transistors	1700M	1950M	1950M	2640M	3000M	2640M	2800M	2800M	2800M	3000M	4310M	3500M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	2048 MB	1280 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	1024 MB	2048 MB	1536 MB	3072 MB	2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	900 MHz	810 MHz	823 MHz	800 MHz	732 MHz	880 MHz	860 MHz	860 MHz	1000 MHz	772 MHz	800 MHz	915 MHz+
Memory Clock	1050 MHz	1002 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	950 MHz	1375 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	1502 MHz
Price	$160	$170	$210	$240	$250	$340	$230	$195	$290	$430	$340	$400