There’s always some sort of roadblock in the GPU market, isn’t there? With crypto-mining, the AI boom, and a global pandemic in between, it’s been a torrid time for PC enthusiasts to upgrade their firepower. Throw some good ol’ fashioned inflation into the mix, and you begin to understand why gamers are clinging to ageing cards.
Well, there’s good news afoot, sort of. You see, six months after launch, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT is belatedly available in the UK at its intended £569 MSRP. Take that as a sign of how crazy the graphics market has been – the best deal is often the price you ought to have been paying from day one.
Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT
“If you can find Radeon RX 9070 XT at its $600 MSRP, there’s simply no reason to opt for anything else for a gaming system.” Read our review.
At the time of writing, the £569 fee is applicable to Sapphire’s Pulse RX 9070 XT, a triple-fan card from one of the best in the business. The forecast isn’t quite as sunny across the pond, as the lowest price at Amazon US is the ASRock RX 9070 XT Challenger, down to $649. That’s still a fair distance from the $599 AMD price tag AMD was so keen to advertise, yet remains a good offer based on what we’ve seen these past few months.
A top pick in the upper-mid-range segment, RX 9070 XT is built on the foundations of latest-generation RDNA 4 architecture and touts 4,096 stream processors in a 357mm2 die packing 53.9bn transistors. Boosting to 2,970MHz and packing 16GB of GDDR6 memory, it is a hugely capable card in terms of raw rasterisation firepower, and forward-looking FSR 4 smarts.
Pair this level of ammunition with a high-speed QHD display and you’re in for some seriously smooth action. There’s scope to deliver in excess of 60fps in a lot of titles at 4K, but for this card, I’m of the opinion QHD remains the sweet spot.
Power consumption is a little higher than the competition, with system-wide draw hitting nearly 500 watts in the trusty Club386 test platform, but temperatures typically run cool. I’d expect both the Sapphire Pulse and ASRock Challenger models to keep noise levels down to an absolute minimum with an optimal fan curve.
Such is the bizarre state of the PC graphics market, it’s highly unlikely these cards are suddenly going to drop another £50 come Black Friday. If you’ve read Sam’s review and like what you see of Radeon RX 9070 XT, get in while the going is good.
