Introduction

PowerColor's Radeon RX 9070 Hellhound is the brand's custom-design take on AMD's latest performance-segment graphics card. Launching at $550, the RX 9070 is positioned as a value-focused alternative to the higher-tier RX 9070 XT. However, with only a narrow $50 price gap between the two, premium custom designs like the Hellhound must justify their place in the market. Designed for high-performance 1440p gaming, including ray tracing, the RX 9070 debuts alongside NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070 at the same $550 MSRP.



The Radeon RX 9070 Series is built on AMD's cutting-edge RDNA 4 graphics architecture, delivering significant improvements in performance per compute unit (CU), ray tracing, and AI acceleration. These advancements make the RX 9070 XT and non-XT more competitive in modern gaming. Enhanced ray tracing performance reduces the performance cost of enabling RT effects, while improved AI acceleration brings machine learning closer to gaming applications. A prime example is FSR 4, AMD's latest ML-based upscaler, which offers superior image quality enhancements across all performance tiers compared to previous iterations.

At the heart of the RX 9070 is the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon, which features several process-level advancements over its predecessors. Unlike NVIDIA's Blackwell generation, which retains the same process node as Ada, AMD has upgraded Navi 48 to the TSMC N4P node, boosting both clock speeds and efficiency. Additionally, Navi 48 is a monolithic chip, eliminating the chiplet-based approach seen in Navi 31. This means that the GPU, memory controllers, and Infinity Cache are all built on a single 4 nm die, complemented by RDNA 4's power management and IPC optimizations.

The RX 9070 comes with 56 compute units (CUs), translating to 3,584 stream processors, 112 AI accelerators, 56 RT accelerators, and 224 TMUs. It also features 112 ROPs—an upgrade from Navi 32's 96 ROPs. The card is equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 20 Gbps across a 256-bit memory bus, providing 640 GB/s of bandwidth. What is disappointing, though, is that this is still older generation 20 Gbps GDDR6, which yields 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Our recent RTX 5070 testing has shown that memory size trumps bandwidth in ray tracing workloads, and AMD has given the RX 9070 a larger on-die cache than the 48 MB NVIDIA gave the RTX 5070, so things could get interesting.

The PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Hellhound features a custom cooling solution designed to maintain optimal performance under heavy loads. Its triple-fan, dual-slot cooler utilizes a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink and precision-engineered heat pipes. Unlike some competing models which adopt the 12V-2x6 power connector, the Hellhound retains a more traditional dual 8-pin power input. PowerColor has tuned the RX 9070 Hellhound with a factory overclock, pushing its Game Clock beyond AMD's reference 2400 MHz specification. You also get a small lighting element and a dual BIOS feature with optional "quiet" BIOS. The PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Hellhound is priced at USD 630, which is a $80 increase over the AMD MSRP of $550.