With the original Radeon RX 7900 XTX launch, I had the chance to check out the reference 7900 XTX and was impressed with its performance but our card did run hot. With the 7900 XT I have had the chance to check out aftermarket cards, but for the 7900 XTX, I haven’t. So when I had the chance to check out the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX I jumped at the chance. I’m really curious how improved cooling and an overclock will change performance, on top of that 7900 XTXs are now more available and selling for less than the original $999 MSRP the Hellhound can be found for $949 so today I’m going to check out what makes the Hellhound special, put it to the test to see how it compares, and then reevaluate how it fits in the market now that prices have dropped. Let’s dig in!

Product Name: PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX

Review Sample Provided by: PowerColor

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Before getting into testing I did also run GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The Hellhound has a boost clock speed of 2525MHz when on the OC mode which is the BIOS profile that the card shipped on. That is a 26 MHz overclock over the 2499 MHz boost clock on the reference card I previously tested. The Hellhound does show up with the correct clock speeds in GPUz and it also documents the BIOS revision and driver used in our testing as well for future reference.

Packaging

The packaging for the PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has an almost black background with a brushed finish on it. Then the Hellhound logo is in the middle inside of a tear across the front. It has the PowerColor logo above that and the Hellhound name below the logo. Then along the bottom, it has the red AMD wrap around which has the GPU model name and the 24GB VRAM listed. That also wraps around to the back where it lists out some AMD features. The back of the box also has a breakdown picture of the card with lines going to key features with descriptions. There are also a few pictures of other features below that.

The box has an inner black box which has all of the structure. When you open it up, right up on top is a layer of foam with cutouts to hold the included GPU support bracket which is in five different pieces. The center is the base with two poles on the left and two clamps on the right which have a small PowerColor logo on them as well as the full brand name on the base. Under this layer is a second thicker layer of foam which has a cutout to fit the Hellhound. The card itself then comes wrapped in its static protective bag as well. 

Card Layout and Photos

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX from PowerColor is a triple fan design with a black plastic textured fan shroud around all of the fans. The card itself is big in every possible direction, especially when we compare it with the reference RX 7900 XTX design. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has a surprisingly clean design which looks boxy but does have the raised areas in the center above and below the center fan that give it a little styling. The shroud is black but does have silver accents near the four corners and the translucent fans are also a big departure from most aftermarket cards that mostly seem to have black fans these days.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is 320 mm long which for reference the reference design is 287 mm long. For card height, it is 118.5 mm tall taller than the 110 mm of the reference card but more compact than you would expect. Then for thickness, it is an impressive 62 mm thick making it a full 3-slot card with an extra 2 mm on top of that. Overall it is a big dude, our reference RTX 7900 XTX ran warm which was the big tradeoff for its size so I’m excited to see what PowerColor can do for cooling with the extra space.

The triple fan design on the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX utilizes two different fan sizes with the two outside fans being 95 mm from edge to edge of the blade or 100 mm for the opening. The smaller center fan is 87 mm wide. The Hellhounds fan design also utilizes two different fan directions, similar to Gigabytes Windforce designs. The two outer fans sping counterclockwise and the center fan spins clockwise. This helps with any airflow blowing off from around the fans to keep them from fighting against each other. This normally helps keep noise down. All three of the fans are translucent and have RGB lighting in the center and around the outside on the fan shroud with six LEDs in the center and nine on the outside to light everything up. The center fan has the PowerColor logo on a sticker in the center and the outer fans both have the Hellhound logo with a silver hound face and blue outline. They all have 9 blades and are designed to blow down into the cooler. They also have an outer ring around the outside that helps give the blades stability as well.

The top edge of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has the Radeon logo printed on it on the PCI bracket end of the card. They have thick metal support brackets along the top. Then down at the end of the PCB which is a few inches from the end of the card they have the two power connections facing up. It has two 8-pin PCIe power connections to power everything, avoiding the new 12VHPWR connection meaning you don’t have to worry about potentially upgrading your power supply assuming your current one can handle the Hellhound's power. With the Hellhound branding, I am surprised that the top of the card doesn’t have anything on the top edge with that brand on it or letting you know it is a 7900 XTX or lighting for that matter.

Looking around at the top, bottom, and end edges gives us a much better idea of why the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a wide card. PowerColor has packed this card with large heatsinks to help keep things running cool. Right in the middle just past the GPU itself they have a whole mess of heatpipes to handle the 8 heatpipes in total for the cooler. All of these sit right on top of the direct contact copper plate on the GPU and VRAM. Six of the nickel-plated copper heatpipes pull the heat down into the back end of the card and the other two loop around and pull heat to the top and bottom edges of the card on the GPU side. The center of that section of course gets heat from on top of the GPU itself which helps spread the heat out. The heatsink is sheet metal aluminum held together by the heatpipes and they have it tight up against the PCB and up under the fan shroud with the heatsink itself going to the 2.5 slot area even before the fans. The end of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has a bracket as well with four screw holes to mount it in cases with that type of anti-sag support.

The back of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has a full-length black brushed aluminum backplate. It runs down beyond the end of the PCB and includes an open area on the far end to blow through and it also gives a peak at the heatsink from behind. Next to that the Hellhound logo is a combination of the triangle that is cut out and the toothy hound face is printed on.  This way the RGB lighting can light up the cutout areas including the eyes on the hound. Above that are the power connections in which the backplate has an opening cut in to help give access to the clips. Alsop with the power connections there is a small LED switch to give a manual option to be able to flip between the standard blue and the amethyst colors or in the middle which turns the lighting off all together. There is a second switch on the top edge towards the PCI bracket as well which also has a cutout in the backplate. This one switches between the two BIOS, one for silent mode and the other for overclock mode. The backplate does have the serial number and model information on a sticker in the bottom right corner. The back of the GPU itself including the back bracket is all cutout and exposed, PowerColor has also printed a few accent stripes on the right side as well.

The wide triple slot PCI bracket for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX has a nice textured black finish. This is a feature I mention in nearly every review and don’t know why we don’t see it more often. The black better matches most builds and blends in when installed and also better matches the card designs as well. For the Hellhound the top two slots have vent holes cut in them in the shape of arrows along with the PowerColor logo. Then down along the bottom next to the PCB, there are four display connections. There is one HDMI up at the top and then four DisplayPorts all in a row making it easy to blindly plug in if needed.

Before getting into testing I did also check out the lighting on the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX and for that, PowerColor has the three fans all lit up as well as the Hellhound logo in the back. The lighting is all in the light blue to match the Hellhound logo and with the switch on the card you can now also switch it to a purple amethyst color, sadly you can’t do other colors to match your build but you can turn the lighting off if you want. The fans stay lit up even when they spin down when not in use. The Hellhound logo on the back looks great, especially having the eyes lit up which is a really nice touch. What the Hellhound doesn’t have and I’m glad to see it is any backlit branding. Too many companies use RGB just to light up their brands which makes your PC look like Times Square, especially if you use different brands for each component. But props to PowerColor for avoiding that.

Test Rig and Procedures

  Test System

CPU: Intel Core-i9 13900K – Live Pricing

PL1=PL2: 253, τ: 56 / 307A

Motherboard: Asus Z790 Extreme – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

  Memory:   Crucial 32GB Kit (2 x 16GB) DDR5-5600 UDIMM– Live Pricing

Storage:   Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB – Live Pricing

Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. In this, I am curious how the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX compares to the reference RTX 7900 XTX. As far as competition from Nvidia, the 3080Ti and the RTX 4080 both sell for more and the RTX 4070 Ti sells for less, so it will be interesting to see how the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX compares to them as well.

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is second in our chart with just the RTX 4090 ahead of it. The overclock on the Hellhound which isn’t very large as well as the cooling did make a noticeable difference between it and the reference 7900 XTX here as well with a big gap in all three tests.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. This is a DX12-focused test and the Nvidia cards overall do a little better here but even with that, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is still second in our charts once again to the RTX 4090 outperforming the RTX 4080 in both tests and once again with a good margin between it and the reference 7900 XTX as well.

For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX dropped down to third in the chart behind the RTX 4080 with the Nvidia cards performing better here, the RTX 3090 Ti being the next card after the two 7900 XTXs.

The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX scored a 17109 to the reference cards 16825 which are both sitting up above the RTX 4080 and with the RTX 4090 still way out in front. This was even more the case on the 4K optimized test as well with the 4090 way out ahead.

VR Benchmarks

As for Virtual Reality, I love it but it is more demanding than traditional gaming. This is partially because of the resolutions needed to render for two eyes and because they render more than what is immediately visible. But also because of post effects to get the proper “fisheye” effect for it to look proper in your eyes with the HMD. You also have to have much higher expectations for frame rates in VR, skipping frames or lower FPS can cause motion sickness in VR. Because of that, I ran a few tests.

  My first test was again in Superposition. This time I tested the VR Future test using the Oculus resolution. I have also included the average frame rate as well which is important for the cards at the top of the chart because for some reason Superposition is capped at 10,000 for its scores and that doesn’t show the performance gap in those cards at the top. All three of the top cards are in that 10k range but I have them sorted by the FPS with the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX 3 FPS in front of the reference 7900 XTX and 17 FPS ahead of the RTX 4080 but the 4090 is once again still way out in front.

My second round of VR testing was in VRMark which has three tests that are similar to the VR tests in Superposition. I only focused on just the most demanding test called Blue Room which is looking more at future VR performance. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is once again in second on this chart with the 4090 way out in front. It has a good margin ahead of the reference RX 7900 XTX and both are in front of the RTX 4080.

In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 10 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of if turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. In total, each video card is tested 54 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So how did the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX do in the overall playability by resolution? No big surprises but at 1080p it didn’t have any performance troubles with everything playing at 120 FPS or higher with 11 over 120 FPS and 5 results over 240 FPS. Even still a majority of these are CPU limited, not completely showing the overall performance. The 1440p results were similar with everything over 120 FPS once again, this time with 13 over 120 FPS and 3 up over 240 FPS, and like with 1080p some of these were CPU limited as well. It is only at 4k that we really see the full performance of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX and this is the resolution that AMD has designed the card for. Everything was smooth with nothing below 60 FPS and a majority of the results were over 120 FPS with 9 in the 120-239 FPS range. Then CS:GO was up over 240 FPS and the only result to do that at 4k.

Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below. I have also averaged out the results for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, the 7900 XTX reference card, and the RTX 4080 sorted by resolution excluding CS:GO which can skew the results. This gives us a good look at where the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX fits. As I have already mentioned at 1080p and 1440p to a lesser extent a lot of the results are CPU limited so those results aren’t as indicative of overall performance. But you can see at 1440p that the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX does still edge out in front of the reference card and both are 4 and 5 FPS in front of the 4080. That gap is larger at 4k where both 7900 XTX have the same averaged FPS. For reference, though the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX did come out to 137.27 where the reference card was 136.72, rounding up and down makes the performance look the same but the small overclock and improved cooler on the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX does have some improvement. Both are then 9 FPS up over the RTX 4080. Looking at the full graphs you will see the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX bounces back and forth between 2^nd and 3rd in the charts depending on the game with the 4080 jumping ahead of it in Borderlands 3 for example but as the averaged numbers show overall the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XTX reference card are in front of the RTX 4080 in most tests at 4k.

Compute Benchmarks

Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases people who game also do work on the side. So it is also important to check out the compute performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was a simple GPU Compute benchmark using Passmark’s Performance Test 10 and the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX didn’t do as well here. In fact, where it has been 2^nd or 3^rd in most of our charts it is down at 6^th here sitting behind the RTX 4070 Ti even. It did perform better than the reference 7900 XTX but it wasn’t enough to make up the difference on the Nvidia cards.

Blender is always my favorite compute benchmark because the open-source 3D rendering software is very popular and it isn’t a synthetic benchmark. With the latest version of Blender, they redid the benchmark so we now have a new test that runs three different renderings and gives each a score. I have all three stacked together so we can see the overall performance. The   Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is down in the middle of the chart here. The Nvidia cards excel with Optix here. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is the fastest of the AMD cards but it is behind the 4060 Ti and even last generations RTX 3070 here and not very far ahead of the new RTX 4060 even.

Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.

For this, our new test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as the new 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like Blender and AIDA64. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result as well which is almost always Time Spy Extreme. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX averaged 434 watts across all of the tests and peaked at 478 watts. The average puts it up near the top of the charts with just the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT from last generation ahead of it. This is 32 watts above the reference card and was enough to jump up ahead of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition. For reference with the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX running ahead of the RTX 4080, the 4080 is farther down in the charts with an average of 310, 124 watts less than the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX. Interestingly the peak wattage for the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX was when running Watch Dogs Legion, not Time Spy which was much closer to the average.

With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX came in at 33.34 points per watt which was slightly more efficient than the reference RX 7900 XTX. This put it below the RTX 4070 Founders Editon as well as the 4080 and 4090 which are a lot more efficient with their lower wattages.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX ran in the bottom 1/3 of the 50% chart at 39.1 db but was just above the midpoint once the fans were cranked up to 100%. The three-fan setup ran the fans at 3383 RPM which does put the 100% fan noise a little higher in the noise chart than in the RPM chart.

I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX came in at 36.3 db which is really impressive for a triple fan card, especially such a high-end model. When under load the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX had its rans running at 42% which helped with the load noise levels as well.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up. Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX leveled off at 65c on the GPU temps but the GPU hotspot was still way up there at 94c. This was 4c lower than the reference card which wasn’t as big of a gap as I expected. Cranking the fan speed up, however, dropped that down to 49c which was 10c lower than the reference card. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX had a 16c delta between the stock fan profile and the 100% fan speed showing just how much room is still left in the cooler. They just have a fan profile that is focused more on keeping things quiet. At 100% fan speed the GPU hotspot did drop down significantly which is a big improvement over our reference card that has the GPU hotspot issue and is always running hot.  

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The fan side of the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is running cool across the entire card with the hottest spot being the bottom half of the far left fan at 39c, but that isn’t too far off from the far end of the card running at 30c. You can see most of the heat is up on the top where a majority of the air is pushed out as well as with the exposed open area in the middle where you get a full view of the OCB as well as the heatpipes right when they leave from over top of the GPU. The backplate does a good job of spreading the heat around except for the exposed back of the GPU which is by far the hottest spot on the card at 72c.

Overall and Final Verdict

Back in December when I first took a look at the RX 7900 XTX reference card I was impressed with its performance, especially when compared with the RTX 4080 from Nvidia and that hasn’t changed at all this time around with the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX. The 1080p performance and a lot of the 1440p performance is fast enough that a lot of our in-game tests are CPU limited even with the 13900K on our test bench. 4k performance looks great as well and in most tests, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX outperforms the RTX 4080. The one big exception is in tests like 3DMark Speedway which uses ray tracing. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX just improves on that slightly with its overclock, but if I’m being honest I figured a card with a name as cool as Hellhound would have had a bigger overclock it is just 26 MHz over the clock speed of the reference 7900 XTX. They make up for that with the cooling, the Hellhound has a monster cooler and it is extremely capable. The base fan profile however leans a little towards keeping things quiet and it does run extremely quiet when under load. Cranking the fans up has it performing well above what the reference card did. With the stock fan profile however, the GPU hotspot does still run hot but with the fans cranked up that did drop so a little tweaking on the fan profile could find a happy medium there.

The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is a big card, but I do dig the styling. PowerColor kept things simple with the triple fan cooler design but it integrates a great looking backplate design which has the Hellhound logo partially lit up including the eyes with a simple squared-off fan shroud design that doesn’t go over the top like most “gaming” focused card designs do. For lighting nothing on the top edge is lit up, you have the accents on the Hellhound logo and all three fans are translucent and lit up. You can change the lighting between blue and purple or turn the lighting off, sadly though there isn’t a full RGB option so you won’t be able to match it to your build. The lighting does look great, but it does feel out of date to not be able to control it at this point. They even gave it a blacked-out PCI bracket which is something I wish every card had.

Like with our other 7900 XTX, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX did struggle when it came to compute tests, especially Blender. It also isn’t the most power-efficient card, it averaged a higher wattage than the RTX 4090 in our tests and was 32 watts higher than the reference 7900 XTX.

The larger cooler did open up some performance and unlike the reference card, you have flexibility on the cooling performance. You can get cooling performance slightly better than the reference design with the stock fan profile and it will run extremely quiet or if you want you can crank things up and have impressive cooling. On top of that, between the December launch and now pricing has come down slightly. At the launch, the base price was $999 and even higher for cards like the Hellhound but you can now get the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX for $949.99 and that also includes Resident Evil 4. That is getting you performance beyond what the RTX 4080 is offering at $200 less making the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX a great value.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.