Product on Review: Hellhound Radeon RX 9070
Manufacturer: Powercolor
MSRP:
- Radeon RX 9070 (USD): $549 excl Tax
- Hellhound Radeon RX 9070: TBC
The first quarter of 2025 has been the most significant in years for the GPU market, with no less than six major launches conducted or planned by the end of March that encompass a wide arc of the PC gaming space. For a while it looked like one side might have things all their own way; plucky AMD however may be set to upend the market through the release of their keenly-priced Radeon RX 9070-series GPUs.
The Radeon RX 9070-series is the first RDNA4 GPU and angles for the ‘bang for your buck’ segment that has long been dominated by ‘xx70’-series GPUs from their rivals. A realignment of their naming scheme for this generation to proximate the main competition shows their intentions, but could so very easily blow up in their face should performance fail to compare favourably.
AMD’s flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT slots in below NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 Ti in price, aggressively so in fact. In undercutting by $150 at MSRP, even before factoring in low availability and inflated pricing for NVIDIA’s card, they set their stall out as the putative ‘smart buy’ of this generation. Internal testing puts the two cards on a part, but that’s still to be confirmed by independent assessment.
The competitiveness of the RX 9070 is less clear. It’s just $50 less than its bigger brother according to current pricing guidance, but on paper is a significantly lower performing part than the 8% price difference would indicate. We expect it to still compare favourably with the RX 7900 GRE, one of their ‘sweet spot’ cards from the last generation, but pressure from above and alongside it - in the form of NVIDIA RTX 5070 - could easily stymie the launch.
Each Radeon RX 9070 is equipped with 56 Compute Units compared with 64 on 9070 XT, and as a result proportionally fewer Ray Accelerators, AI Accelerators and TMUs. Nonetheless, it still boasts 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory bus for the same 640 GB/s memory bandwidth, as well as the significantly improved raytracing and AI performance unlocked by RDNA4 (compared to RDNA3).
Powercolor’s Hellhound Radeon RX 9070 OC Edition arrives with a 70MHz factory overclock to 2.59 GHz, as well as augmented cooling in the form of a dual-slot triple-fan solution with long heatsink and Honeywell PTM7950 phase-change thermal pads. A secondary vBIOS also allows the card to run quieter with lower default stocks and a less aggressive fan profile.
Powercolor have also opted to utilise two tried-and-tested 8-pin PCIe power connectors rather than the 12V-2x6 / 12VHPWR connector option. This, coupled with a relatively modest 220W TBP, will make the card relatively easy to accommodate in systems powered by older PSUs not certified for ATX 3.0/3.1 operation.
