Powercolor Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound review

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Final words and conclusion

Final words

Right then, the Hellhound is a product that sits (performance wise) spot on reference with the usual offsets here and there. PowerColor manages to offer a decent-looking and fairly silent product to the market. It's interesting to see that its power consumption under load was even a notch lower than reference, roughly 200W. Overall the Radeon RX 6700 XT is a hip little card in that WQHD (2560x1440) resolution domain for gaming; however, very expensive. We've seen incredible price hikes in the past two years where mainstream series graphics cards have been repositioned as high-end once, with accompanying price levels. NVIDIA has started that trend, and where AMD always had a little more value to offer, this year that tide has turned. It might be so that the reference RX 6700 XT sits close to RTX 3060 Ti and sometimes 3070 performance, but only in shading performance. Raytracing performance is just quite a bunch slower than the competition offers. I can also not apprehend that AMD still has not implemented any form of machine learning super-sampling, dedicated in hardware much like NVIDIA offers Tensor cores. For these two reasons (RT perf and lacking MLAA) we cast doubt as to why AMD is trying to justify a price of 479 USD as really the true competitor here is the RTX 3060 Ti with its 399 USD MSRP. NVIDIA introduced its Tensor cores back in the summer of 2018 (!). You can also argue that while the Infinity cache works most of the time, it's designed to be a workaround to fill a flaw in the choice of memory type (GDDR6 opposed to GDDR6X), the current AMD GPUs are memory bandwidth deprived, even with GDDR6 at 16 Gbps, but especially running over a 192-bit wide memory bus.


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Smart Acces memory

A recent method that AMD made available and a method that is now passing onwards to intel and NVIDIA as well is SAM. Smart Access memory it is able to boost your framerates a bit further, sometimes significantly sometimes a little, sometimes not at all. SAM requires that CSM Support is turned off in the BIOS in order to enable the above 4G Decode, which will allow Resizable Bar Support (SAM) to be enabled. The problem here is that if your Windows installation is configured as non-UEFI, Windows will be unable to boot from your currently installed SSD/HDD. Most PCs will be configured like that. The only solution is to disable CSM, and reinstall Windows 10 to get this feature-set supported, or perform some really advanced trickery. That said, SAM is not yet 100% stable, especially swapping out cards with another one, and cards that don't support SAM, can end up in black screens. The only solution then is the clear CMOS and start configuring from scratch. As such for now, we'll be collecting SAM results, however, publish them separately on a dedicated page in the article.

Performance spread reference and AIBs

We've been quite busy the past week or so as we have lined up six Radeon RX 6700 XT reviews, actually seven but we're still awaiting a Gigabyte sample.  So from top to bottom the differences certainly are not huge, have a peek: 


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So the chart above is arbitrary in the sense that results can deffer a single% here and there, less so in fillrate limited situation, more so in GPU bound situations. But from reference to the fastest AIB cards, you're looking at 3 to 4% differentials (depending on game and resolution).

Cooling & acoustic

Powercolor has a very decent performing cooling design. Expect under 60 Degrees C game load ranges depending on the internal airflow inside your chassis.  Acoustics wise the product remains fairly silent, reaching the 35~36 DBa marker. However one of our fans exhibited a bit of a buzzing noise, so that value might be even lower in other reviews as it was defect (albeit a small one). FLIR imaging shows the card is hardly bleeding heat. Overall, we're very satisfied with what we observed. 

Energy consumption

Heat output and energy consumption are closely related to each other, as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 250 Watts in energy consumption approaches close to 250 Watts in heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. AMD is listing the card at 230W, which is okay at best for a graphics card in the year 2021. We measure the typical gaming power consumption of the card spot on at 200 Watt, with minor spikes towards 217W. Idle power consumption sits at 17 Watts (TBP - total board power).

Coil whine

Compared to the reference Radeon RX 6700 XT, the Powercolor card exhibits merely a little coil squeal. It's at a level you can hardly hear it. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at higher framerates; this can be perceived. 

Pricing

Worrying. We've asked an MSRP, however, Powercolor will not give it. We hope it's at the 499 USD marker.  I raised enough concern about the general pricing of this product series, though. 

Tweaking

AMD has two GPU SKUs available, reference and OC. The hellhound is a non-OC SKU, which means it'll run into three restrictions;

  1. Maximum memory bandwidth. You can add it by dialing up the memory frequency towards 17.2 Gbps; AMD enforces limits on the memory subsystem, limiting your GDDR6 memory that maximum overclock. 
  2. The maximum clock frequency for tweaking is 2800 MHz
  3. More limitation on the power budget, 15% tweaking is still there, but the max base power is lower at ~200W, so add 15% and max ~230W is what you can assign as power budget.

The clock frequency remains spectacular; after selecting 2800 MHz, the GPU was settling at 2700~2750MHz. Combined with a slightly increased power limiter, you'll have gained a strict 4% additional performance.

Conclusion

The hellhound is a more normal-looking and performing product, and if the product sticks close to MSRP, we would certainly appreciate that (albeit general, the AMD MSRP already is out of my comfort zone, though). We had a small issue with one of the fans exhibiting a bit of buzz/grinding noise; this might have affected the acoustic measurement. However, even with that defect, we measured ~36 DBa, presumable with a properly working fan; the card simply is 100% silent. Hey, it happens. That low acoustic level combined with the low operating temperatures does make this an interesting product. You can easily tweak a notch extra perf out of the card, albeit being more restricted. The looks are a bit more simplified; however, it certainly is not a bad-looking product at all. The fans radiate one color, blue, which you can turn off with a small switch; it's not a Christmas tree with blinking lights. You'll retrieve an admirable performing product in that WQHD range at very pleasing temperatures and acoustic levels. Overall it's a lovely Full HD and Quad HD card with abilities at Ultra HD as well. Raytracing performance on this generation RDNA2 cards is a bit more mediocre, and of course, AMD lacks something DLSS, bigtime. It has nothing to do with TUL/PowerColor though, and this round, AMD priced the card series starting at close to 500 bucks for something intended in the WQHD monitor range. While we can recommend the card as what Powercolor offers, we remain to have a very hard time justifying the overall price level that AMD has set. However, without an actual MSRP we cannot objectively award this product.

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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.

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