Packaging

The Card

The PowerColor HellHound uses a mostly-black color theme, with some silvery highlights around the fans, paired with transparent fan blades. Both the cooler shroud and backplate are made from metal.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1260 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and one HDMI 2.1a (same as RDNA 2).

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with two independent hardware units that can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. There's support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


The card uses a classic dual 8-pin plus PCIe slot power input config, rated for 375 W maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12V-2x6 connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw. Right next to the power inputs, there's a physical switch that lets you shut off the RGB lighting—without any software installation required.


The card comes with fixed-color lighting on the front and back, which can be changed between blue and purple, or turned off.


PowerColor has equipped their Hellhound with a dual BIOS feature, the second BIOS lets you enable a "quiet" mode that runs the fans at reduced fan speed for improved acoustics.

Teardown

The main heatsink uses five heatpipes. It also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.