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 The lighting does look great, but it does feel out of date to not be able to control it at this point.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
