PowerColor’s custom cooled Red Dragon Radeon RX Vega 56 takes flight this month

PowerColor is releasing another Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card, this latest one under its Red Dragon branding with a custom air cooler and an ever-so-slightly overclocked boost clock.

The new Red Dragon RX Vega 56 is listed as having up to a 1,478MHz boost clock, which is just a hair faster than AMD's reference 1,471MHz setting. Technically we suppose that's an overclock, but in reality, it's nothing to get excited about. Still, the model number (AXRX Vega 56 8GBHBM2-2D2HD/OC) bills this as an overclocked part, more likely because its 1,177MHz base clock is 21Mhz faster than reference. There also a BIOS switch to drop the clockspeed from "Overclocking" to "Silent" mode, the latter of which causes the card to become "near inaudible even during extreme gaming," according to PowerColor.

What's more interesting is the three-fan cooling solution to quell the Red Dragon's fire. In theory, that should provide much better cooling to the GPU and memory compared to AMD's stock cooler with just a single fan. PowerColor's three-fan design is similar to the one found on its Red Devil variant, just not as thick—it should fit comfortably in a dual-slot arrangement.

Like all Radeon RX Vega 56 cards, the Red Dragon variant features 3,584 Vega stream processors and 8GB of on-package HBM2 memory with a 2,048-bit memory interface. For connectivity, it sports a pair of HDMI outputs and two DisplayPort outputs. It draws power from 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors (one each).

PowerColor says the Red Dragon RX Vega 56 will be available starting March 28, but did not mention a price. Not that it matters right now anyway—most cards (including Vega) are selling at inflated prices, and we suspect the same fate awaits this one.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).