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).

Latest in Graphics Cards
Nvidia App
Hmmm, upgrades: Nvidia App gets an optional AI assistant and custom DLSS resolution scaling
A close-up photo of an Nvidia RTX 4070, with its heatsink removed, showing the AD104 GPU die and the surrounding Micron GDDR6X VRAM chips
With Nvidia Ace taking up 1 GB of VRAM in Inzoi, Team Green will need to up its memory game if AI NPCs take off in PC gaming
A collage of Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, as shown in AMD's promotional video for the launch of RDNA 4 at CES 2025
AMD's CEO claims 9070 XT sales are 10x higher than all previous Radeon generations but that's just for the first week of availability
Colorful iGame RTX 5070 Ti Vulcan OC graphics card from various angles
The RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti are rumoured to be mere weeks away, with board partners reportedly required to ensure at least one MSRP model at launch
Nvidia headquarters
Nvidia CEO sets sights on making 'several hundred billion' dollars worth of electronics in the USA over the next four years, increasing the chance of your next GPU being made in America
The Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Dhahab Edition, a gold-plated graphics card on a sand dune background
A Jensen Huang-signed version of this golden Asus RTX 5090 will be auctioned off to support relief efforts for the California wildfires
Latest in News
An Enshrouded player in a recreation of Erebor from The Lord of the Rings
Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings
A mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened