PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Review – Budget VRAM Pusher

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT has just been recently announced at CES 2024, and this is one of AMD’s strategy in addressing gamer needs in more VRAM and improvement in certain features that streamers wanted. Of course this is also a way of AMD on keeping the RDNA 3 graphics architecture available accross all levels, closing the pricing gap and category.

We will have a look at the PowerColor Hellhound AMD RX 7600 XT, one of the AMD’s AIB vendor variant of the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT. All review, opinions and results should reflects similarly with other AIB cards or it’s cross reference results over AMD’s Reference card if any that is indicated in the charts.

Technical Specifications

Design

This is not the first time that we are reviewing a PowerColor card, and I do love their subtle design that is at least not shouting over some great looks, rather practical sense and logical in most cases. Starting from the outlook the GPU design is still pretty much a classic looker, with modern cooling solutions like an improved aluminum heatsink design and bigger dual fans with silent bearings. Other than that it does have 2 physical switch toggle, one to turn the mode as Silent or OC, where OC mode pushes the clock limits and the second toggle is switching the LED lights, Ice blue shows coolness and elegance while amethyst represents mystery and charm.

PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Features

• Dual BIOS – Choose OC Mode which allows you to easily handle top-of-the-line games by pushing the limit of the power and performance, while Silent Mode provides an excellent quiet-gaming experience.
• Dual Ball Bearings – Providing excellent heat dissipation and effectively doubling the expected lifetime of the fans.
• Intelligent Fan Controller – Activate once the GPU temperature hits 60℃ and stop when it falls below 50℃. This precise temperature control leads to effective cooling, reduced fan noise, and enhanced longevity of the card.
• Horizontal Aluminum Fin Design – Helps the copper heatpipes collect and dissipate heat with maximum efficiency.
• Dual-Fan Cooler – Equipped with 4X6Φ nickel-plated copper heatpipes and an enlarged heatsink surface to provide lower temperature and better performance.
• SPS DrMOS Power Kit – 7+2 phase VRM makes for better overclocking and stability with low power loss
• User Switchable LED Color – Choose the color by flipping the switch on side of the card. Ice blue shows coolness and elegance while amethyst represents mystery and charm.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Features

• AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) – uses cutting-edge upscaling technologies to help boost your framerates in select titles and deliver high-quality, high-resolution gaming experiences, without having to upgrade to a new graphics card.
• AMD Smart Access Memory – Combine an AMD Ryzen 5000/7000 Series processor with an AMD Radeon RX 6000/7000 Series graphics card to boost system’s performance. Enjoy increased performance with all-AMD system for the better gaming advantage.

• AMD Radeon Anti-Lag – Controls the pace of the CPU work to make sure it doesn’t get too far ahead of the GPU, reducing the amount of CPU work queued up by shrinking input lag by almost a full frame, helping to restore the responsiveness to your game.
• 2nd Generation AMD Infinity Cache – Allows fast data access and acts as a high performance bandwidth amplifier with great power efficiency.
• AMD RDNA 3 – Featuring new AI acceleration and 2nd generation Ray Tracing for maximizing image quality while delivering high framerates.
• 8K Video Encoding/Decoding – It Supports AV1, H.264 and HEVC codecs

Card Output Ports Lists

• Output : 1x HDMI 3x DisplayPort

What is Hypr-RX

In layman terms, it’s a one click solution from the AMD Software home tab. This will increase FPS performance and minimized input lag, or use HYPR-RX Eco for power savings across your AMD-powered platform. This will also enable AMD Fluid Motion Frames which is also a part of HYPR-RX now. The HYPR-RX is not just limited to AMD Desktop GPU, but also covers AMD Radeon RX Mobile GPU including some AMD APU.

Test Setup

We will be using the below as a test setup for the PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT for the purpose of the benchmark, with comparison used on other cards, SAM/BAR is enabled.

Note : since we have passed embargo dates, the 7600 XT will be tested on official drivers

Cards in reference

Benchmark Scores (With BAR Enabled). Ambient Room Temp : 24 Celsius

* Benchmarks charts and numbers may be updated from time to time due to driver updates, enhancements and changes/fixes.

Verdict & thoughts

The PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT is appealing for those who wanted an AIB card with just simple LED switch and it is basically a plug in the card, install the drivers and ready to go Graphics Card with simple OC/Silent switch on the physical level. Should you need to pair this graphic card with your system, I suggest any mid tier processor such as the 12th Gen Core i5 or Ryzen 5000 series will work well and balance on such system. From pricing wise, I think it is quite on par and fair and the major advantage is on the amount of VRAM that you can take on, especially keeping up the games that seemingly needs more VRAM. To add, this is generally something to take a look at, especially if you are migrating from an older GTX10 Series or RX400 series GPU, which should take advantage of the latest GPU features such as DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan support.

Pricing and Availability

It is announced that the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT will start from 329USD, however branded AIB cards price may varied such as the PowerColor model, it should be hovering around the price bracket as well.

For More information on the Product, Visit Below for more info.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT | AIB : PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT |

Special thanks to AMD, ASRock, PowerColor, Kingston, ID COOLING, Thermaltake on providing/loaning us the needed hardware for this review and games provided by AMD, Bethesda, Sony Computer Entertainment, Ubisoft