Packaging

The Card

The PowerColor RX 9070 Series Hellhound design matches the style of the company's Radeon RX 7000 Series Hellhound cards. Black is the primary color, with gray and white highlights sprinkled on the card. The metal backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1076 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 40 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1a and a HDMI 2.1b.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


PowerColor has installed a fixed blue lighting element behind the eye of the hound print on the back of the card, on the eye—very hard to notice. A second zone of the same color is located near the back end of the card.


The card uses two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which are specified for up to 300 W, plus 75 W from the slot, the actual power limit of the card is much lower of course.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default performance BIOS and a second "quiet" BIOS. Also note here, the LED switch, which lets you turn off the lighting easily, without any software installation needed.

Teardown

The PowerColor cooling solution uses four heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.