Introduction

PowerColor Radeon RX 7800 XT Hellhound is a sporty looking custom-design graphics card powered by AMD's latest entry to the performance segment. Today's double launch of the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT sees AMD fill a vast performance gap that existed between its mainstream RX 7600 and enthusiast RX 7900 series. The Hellhound brand of graphics cards by PowerColor was introduced only a few generations ago, it strikes a balance between the premium feature-set of the company's top Red Devil series, and the cost-effective Fighter series. You get a fairly powerful cooling solution that can square off against the best RX 7800 XT cards out there; most of the enthusiast features from the Red Devil series, and a handy factory overclock.



The Radeon RX 7800 XT and its sibling the RX 7700 XT are designed to offer maxed out gaming at 1440p, and high refresh-rate e-sports gaming at 1080p. These are firmly next-gen graphics cards, as they are based on the latest RDNA 3 architecture, and use the contemporary 5 nm EUV foundry node, at least where it matters. The RDNA 3 graphics architecture introduces generational performance uplifts, and several new features. Its dual-issue rate compute unit more effectively utilizes idle SIMD hardware resources, and the new AI accelerator gives them matrix-math capabilities. The 2nd generation Ray accelerator offers a 50% uplift in ray intersection performance. The MDIA (multi-draw indirect accelerator) promises breakthrough performance improvements for DirectX apps that are optimized for it.

The RX 7800 XT debuts the new Navi 32 GPU, which is based on the same chiplet philosophy as the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series. AMD identified the specific components of the GPU that could benefit from the switch to the 5 nm foundry node, and clumped them into a centralized silicon known as the graphics compute die (GCD); while the components that don't tangibly benefit from the switch yet take up valuable die-area—the Infinity Cache memory and GDDR6 memory controllers, are spun off into several little chiplets called the memory cache dies (MCDs). The Navi 32 has four of these, each with a 16 MB segment of the GPU's 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of its 256-bit memory bus, which AMD equipped with 16 GB of 19.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory that churns out an impressive 624 GB/s of bandwidth. The RX 7800 XT maxes out the Navi 32 silicon, enabling all 60 RDNA 3 compute units physically present, and all four MCDs. These give it 3,840 stream processors, 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, 96 ROPs, 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface.

PowerColor Hellhound backs the RX 7800 XT with a factory overclock of 2213 MHz Game clock, compared to 2124 MHz reference. It also gives you several enthusiast-class features such as a large triple-slot cooling solution, an easy to maintain set of three fans that come off with the cooler shroud without disturbing the heatsink underneath; double ball-bearings and LED illumination for the fans, dual-BIOS, and DrMOS with smart digital monitoring. PowerColor is pricing the RX 7800 XT Hellhound at $500—there's no premium over the $500 starting price.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 9x RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.