Overall and Final Verdict
The Hellhound cards from PowerColor have been popular and I completely get it. The whole over the top “gamer” designs get old and something that bridges the gap between that and a basic card design is always nice. In the case of the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE they have gone even simpler than with the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX, it has a completely flat fan shroud with just a touch of chrome around the three fans for styling. All of the flash is tied in with the clear fans that have lighting but I do have to point out that you are locked in with the two Hellhound lighting colors just like with the XTX. That is a purple and a blue and both do look great but I would love to have a white option for times those don’t fit with your build and I know some people will be disappointed there isn’t RGB to match the lighting perfectly with the rest of your build. The craziest thing for me with the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE is the crazy name compared to how clean and simple the design is, this feels a lot more like a card like Asus’s ArtPro lineup.
For performance the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE performed great at 1440p and 4k, none of our tests had any trouble and while the GRE has dropped the memory performance off slightly with the smaller memory bus compared to the RX 7900 XT and having 16GB of VRAM vs 20 GB or 24 GB it still did handle 4k well and bridge the gap between the higher end 1440p and mid-range 4k performance. This put the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE in ahead of the new RTX 4070 SUPER and just barely behind the RTX 4070 Ti and fills the big void in AMDs lineup between the 7800 XT and 7900 XT. The Hellhound RX 7900 GRE specifically did well in its cooler testing with it being a lot quieter than I expected anytime it was at 50% fan speed or below, it wasn’t loud at 100% fan speed but it did move up into the middle of our charts at those speeds. But the most impressive part was its cooling performance, especially considering this card is a lot thinner than the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX that I previously took a look at. It not only ran at the bottom of our charts with the stock fan profile, but it improved on that at 100% fan speed as well showing there was still room left even with the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE having a big overclock on it. The GPU Hotspot temps with the stock fan speeds were a touch high, but that is being overly critical given how good the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE performed otherwise. That big overclock didn’t help when it came to power efficiency testing however, AMD has been a little behind there but I thought the GRE might improve on that slightly with a lower TBP than the 7800 XT but the overclock took that off of the table. It doesn’t show up in the performance numbers, but I also have to note just how well the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE worked in our testing. It’s not unusual to run into quirks or issues with drivers when running prelaunch drivers but because this is a card that is already in the market, I didn’t have any issues at all.
So performance-wise wise the Hellhound RX 7900 GRE is out in front of the RTX 4070 SUPER and just behind the recently replaced RTX 4070 Ti. How does that look once we take pricing into account? Well, to start things off the RX 7900 GRE has a base MSRP of $549 but I don’t know the actual MSRP of the overclocked Hellhound RX 7900 GRE that I have tested today. I have to assume it is a little higher than that though. The RTX 4070 SUPER is running at $599 and higher and the RTX 4070 Ti and the new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER are both in the $799 and higher range. Even with a buffer for the overclocked Hellhound model, AMD is sitting pretty in pricing when we are looking at pure gaming performance. Nvidia does a little better with ray tracing performance currently but that isn’t making up the difference here. This is a good value for those looking for 1440p or 4k performance.
Live Pricing: HERE
