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.