PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon 7900 GRE 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card

I picked up this card to replace an aging, but functional RTX 2060. The FE 2060 didn’t have drivers for a “silent” mode and the noise drove me nuts, even at idle. The Hellhound has a good reputation for sound and when it dropped to MSRP I decided to get one. Very happy with the purchase. The card itself seems great. Has optional lights but not RGB. Not a big deal for me. It’s big, so check your clearances, but no issues in the case I have. (Be Quiet 500DX) Noise levels are great. Fans don’t spin at idle and there’s no coil whine even under load. (That’s a bit random and not necessarily a defect but it’s nice I lucked out.)

Performance seems good. It’s misleading how powerful this is as I also jumped from 1080p to 1440p at the same time. That masks some of the gains. No complaints. Note / PSA. Fully uninstall all drivers if switching from NVIDIA to AMD GPU’s. It can make a difference.

For my uses, this seems to a sweet spot buy for this generation. NVIDIA is out of their minds to charge what they are charging for 12 gb of RAM. This 16 gb card should stay relevant for a while.

The cooling is incredible. Even running many different games like Diablo 4, Palworld, dark souls, Seikro, Elden ring, the list goes on I never saw temps go higher then around 65 Celsius. Would also like to note I run all games in 4K. My AVG fps in most games was 200+ in well optimized games. In Palworld I played it at launch and would avg around 90-140 fps in 4K myself. But the value for your money is amazing. I had a 6950 before this and let me say this 7900 XTX is an insane value for me. The 6950 isn’t a bad card it performs very well and I had no issues with it besides coil whine. That being said I’d definitely consider it an entry level 4k card. The difference when I play most games is night and day. The Upscaling feature that AMD uses is great too. It’s obviously not as good as an Nvidia card but in most cases I got huge gains and minimal drawback. I know most people debate about 60fps to 120fps but let me say that for me it’s extremely noticeable. Which is why with my 6950 I called it an entry level 4k card. Because my avg FPS in 4K for most games was 60. Some would get more of course but a large majority did not get me 120-200fps. If you can get this card on sale anything under a 850$ price tag its a bargain for the money.

I was trying to make the choice between this, a 4070 Super, and a 7900 XT. I don’t care about ray tracing. I don’t play games that use it all that much.

I’m glad I saved a few dollars and went with this card. It doesn’t use as much power as I thought it would. I notice it getting up to about 175 watts when I’m using it. It provides me plenty of frames. I play mostly World of Warcraft and this card is MORE than enough for that game. Final Fantasy looks really good with this card as well.

It is smaller than I thought it would be so I had absolutely no issues fitting it inside my mid tower case with lots of room to spare.

It has a switch where you can decide to use ice blue lightning, and amethyst color (light purple), or no lighting. I’m not big on RGB stuff so I use the amethyst. It’s sort of soothing. It also has two bios setting switches if you are into that sort of thing. I am not.

I did find the need to support the right end with a GPU stand. Without the stand, it didn’t sit level. I think this is an issue with nearly every GPU. In any case, it looks sharp, gives me lots of FPS, and is super quiet. It doesn’t get hot in my well ventilated case and I’m very pleased with this purchase. I highly recommend it.

Update: 11/18/2023 Card is still going strong 💪

This card has completely exceeded my
expectations, coming from a gtx 1080. I can play Forza horizon 5 at MAX settings 4k and get between 90-110 fps, on a 4k 1500+ skyrim modlist I’m getting 80fps indoors and 50-60 outdoors and nearly maxing out the 20gb of vram *albeit with a bottleneck from my 3700x. Every other game I’ve tested have been great. Ray tracing performance is actually great to, if your willing to part with some settings and use FSR. The new consoles have a 40fps mode for vrr screens, I’ve used that as inspiration for my raytracing settings and I’ve been able to lock it there at 4k with the lowest FSR settings being “balanced”.

The build of the card is great, feels premium and the looks are just 😩. I do have some minor worries/complaints, my model does have coil wine, but it’s more like a buzz then a wine, and doesn’t bother me. My other complaint is that when I was plugging my power cables in, one of the pcie connectors has an audible click when putting pressure on it, making me think it’s possibly detached slightly. But after turning on and testing games, the card is drawing the full 380w and I touched the connectors while playing and they weren’t hot, so all is good there. My temperature stays between 30-50c when idle and the highest temp was 70c when full load gaming. If your temps are higher then you like, go Into the adrenaline software and turn on fan tuning, then just adjust the fan speed to your liking “I use 75% speed”. Adrenaline software has been great to use and defaults to all the right display settings, “Ancient gameplays” has a good video going through the settings. I haven’t overclocked it yet, other then just maxing its power draw and now it consumes 380w.

So to sum it up, I think this is the best 4k card before a 4090. The xtx is an easy step up if you can find a deal, but the 4080 is not a good deal in longevity for 4k. When switching from the gtx 1080, I thought I was going to get a stutter fest, play old games and realize they aren’t optimized ect. But my experience has been far from what I was led to believe and I’ve watched enough benchmark test to see that amd is right there with nvidia.

*it’s very important to uninstall your previous drivers with DDU (display driver uninstaller) “Ancient gameplay” also has a great video for that on YT
*Don’t forget to enable resisable bar/sam in your bios, for sizable perf boost in some games.
*make sure you refer to your card as “THE HELLHOUND” it will give immense satisfaction and could increase fps.

[Pc specs/everything else]
Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro
Ryzen 3700x, drop in upgraded to 5800x3d and no more bottleneck
Radeon 7900xt
3600 ram with super tight timings
EVGA G7 750w PSU
Samsung S95B 4k 120hz tv

[Overclocking]
Min clock 2400MHz
Max clock 2900MHz
Undervolt 1060mV from 1100mV base
Ram 2714MHz with standard timings
Maxed power draw
Fan speed 75% *same for efficiency settings, I now rarely hit 70c anymore and some games even stay under 60c, also helps the cpu run cooler.
*about a 9% improvement for me

[For better efficiency, try these settings]
Min Clock 2500MHz
Max Clock 2600MHz
Undervolt I recommend 1060mV *find your good value
Ram 2714MHz
Power limit Maxed, power limit and gpu frequency are tied. Lower frequency = less power needed. Higher frequency = more power needed. Maxing the power limit at a lower frequency such as 2600 ensures it will stay there, but only draw what it needs. My power draw with these settings range from 280w to 320 @4k and I only see a 3 to 5 fps drop VS the above OC.

I’ve tried higher clock speeds, but didn’t see much improvement. My ram easily went up to 2800mhz, but again didn’t see much improvement and I think it was taking away from the gpu frequency. The Undervolt was pretty difficult to get right. I used a few videos for reference, one was using 1005mV on one game, but it wasn’t stable for me and after testing multiple games, I found 1050mV was a safe result with a 4 to 6% improvement in performance on its own.

*different games can be more finicky with the undervolt, I’ve seen some having to set it back to default to be stable and for some games, you can go surprisingly low. So it’s best to stay close to the default 1100mV to avoid frustration.

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List of games
[Starfield 4k max] 55-120 and 70-120 with optimized settings *some locations run great but the citys and some of the planets can tank. New Atlantis does cause some trouble for my cpu even at 4k putting the utilization of my gpu to 90% and the cpu at 70% util 😳, so small bottleneck in very specific locations of the game. I found enabling FSR2 and reducing resolution scale to 75-80% is a good value, and graphic settings do not need to be maxed for good visuals either. Checkout “starfield project optimization” on the Nexus mods site and use their ultra preset, then use “Hardware unboxed YT” optimized settings on top.
[FH5 4k max 90-110 fps]
[Witcher 3 4K no rt 90-100 fps *low screen space setting]
[RDR2 4K max 60-80 fps]
100-120 with “hardware unboxed” optimized settings
[Cyberpunk 4k 60-80 fps *ultra screen space]
I dont recommend maxing out screen space, the psycho setting is almost as demanding as ray traced reflections. Fsr 2 at quality gives me a consistent 120fps with optimized settings.
[Skyrim SE 1500+ mods 4k] Places like the riften forest with my mods dips me down to 30-40 fps, 50 fps in normal forested areas and 80-90 fps in non-forested. Cities 60-80 and inside I get 80-110. It runs very smooth with my 5800x3d and I have no reason to believe AMD is worse for modding in this game, not to mention the enormous amount of vram to take advantage of.
[Star wars fallen order 2019 4k max]100-120 fps *minor stutters with my cpu or just the game.
[Fortnite Epic textures and view distance 1440p] 280+ I cap my fps in this game so I don’t know how high it could go, but it’s very consistent, I also noticed that coming from a gtx 1080, there’re a lot less stutters, especially after changing setting to max, it’s butter most of the time.

Good
Price to performance is much better than the equivalent 4070~80 cards
Only needs 2 8 pins to power
Dual bios is a good fail safe
Very high quality material

Bad
There is a small lip near the bottom of the 3 slot bracket making it incompatible with most GPU pcie brackets
Still sags

Notes:
Courier might not be gentle. Mine just dropped it on the ground so take into consideration.