PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 XTX Spectral White Review

Name: PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX Spectral White
Brand: PowerColor

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 11, 2023, 03:20 PM EDT

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid-state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

Hardware Used:
AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D
(3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core)

Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi
16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200
Samsung SSD 970 EVO
Integrated Audio / Network

ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX

Relevant Software:
Windows 11 Pro 22H2
AMD Radeon 23.4.1
NVIDIA Drivers v527.62

Benchmarks Used:
LuxMark v4
IndigoBench v4.4.15

UL 3DMark
UL VRMark
Unigine Superposition
CryTek Neon Noir
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
FarCry 6
F1 2022
Guardians Of The Galaxy

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.

luxmark powercolor hellhound 7900xtx perf

The PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX ended up trailing the AMD reference card by a few percentage points here, which resulted in it falling behind the RTX 3090 Ti -- in one test at least. The Hellhound was faster than the 3090 Ti in the mode taxing Food scene but trailed in the Hall Bench scene.

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

IndigoBench is based on Indigo 4's advanced rendering engine and offers both CPU and GPU rendering modes for its two built-in models. The standalone benchmark is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and outputs results in M/Samples per second.

indigo powercolor hellhound 7900xtx perf

The PowerColor Hellhound RX 7900 XTX also trailed the AMD reference design by the tiniest of margins with both IndigoBench models, which put it well behind the NVIDIA powered cards.

Tags: AMD, Gaming, graphics, GPU, Powercolor, rdna 3, hellhound

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com