PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Hellhound Review

Conclusion

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the PowerColour RX 7900 XTX Hellhound, take a close look at the picture above.

The Hellhound is a white card, but unlike most of the modern ‘white’ hardware, there isn’t swathes of silver mucking up the aesthetic. Similarly the clear fan blades really help the lighting pop, and that is aided by the short fan shroud which lets the lighting bleed into the heatsink. Lastly the Hellhound logo surround on the backplate also lights up. Clearly PowerColor have put a lot of thought into the Hellhound, rather than merely spraying the black bits white and calling it a day. They deserve some brownie points for this alone, and that’s before we’ve got into the performance and thermal side of things.

Speaking of performance, it would be easy to look at the average Clock Speed graph on page three and come away thinking the Hellhound isn’t all that. It’s 100 MHz behind some of the others and nearly 200 MHz behind the official AMD card. However, once we actually came to test the card the performance was very much on a par with any of the other XTX cards we’ve reviewed. Whether that is because the card goes into the low-power clock speed faster than the others, dragging down the average whilst still being close to the peak clock speed we don’t know. Certainly if you ignore the reported average clock speed and just looked at the frames per second you’ll come away, as we did, very impressed by the Hellhound.

The aesthetics are pleasing, and the performance is excellent. Cooling is similarly great, being only bested by the XFX in our temperature graph, but the PowerColor is a little quieter even when running hard. We’ll happily give up a few degrees for a quieter system, rather than one that turns into a vacuum cleaner the moment you start pushing things. Power draw, so key in these cost-of-living crisis times, is also excellent, matching up to the reference AMD card.

Often if you’re after a piece of hardware in a certain colour to match the rest of your rig then you might need to compromise on quality or performance to obtain the harmonious aesthetic that is so pleasing. The PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Hellhound is one of the rare breed of components which has paid super-close attention to how the card looks as well as how it performs, to the point that not only are there no compromises to be made, but it’s also the coolest looking white GPU we’ve seen in a while and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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