RX 9060 XT Roundup: ASRock, PowerColor and Sapphire Tested!

1. Introduction2. ASRock RX 9060 XT Steel Legend3. PowerColor RX 9060 XT Hellhound4. Sapphire RX 9060 XT Nitro+5. Testing Methodology6. Game Benchmarks7. Clock Speed8. GPU Temperatures9. Acoustics10. Noise-Normalised Temperatures11. Power Draw and Efficiency12. Overclocking13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

After the launch of AMD's RX 9060 XT 16GB last week, we were keen to see what AMD’s board partners could bring to the table with their custom designs. To that end, today we are analysing the ASRock Steel Legend, PowerColor Hellhound, and Sapphire Nitro+. With prices ranging from £350 up to £380, is there a clear winner among these partner cards? We find out today.

While at launch we assessed the ASUS Prime model, today our attention turns to three other custom cards from AMD's partners. The ASRock Steel Legend is a premium model, offering a clean white-and-grey aesthetic, alongside plentiful ARGB lighting and a factory overclocked core. PowerColor's Hellhound model may not be so eye-catching, but at £350 it's the cheapest of the three on test today and still packs in features like dual-BIOS. Last but not least, the Sapphire Nitro+ is as elegant as ever, but at £380 it's also the most expensive card we are reviewing. Let's find out exactly how each of these cards perform.

	RX 9070 XT	RX 9070	RX 9060 XT	RX 7600 XT	RX 7600
Architecture	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 3	RDNA 3
Manufacturing Process	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	TSMC N4	6 nm	6 nm
Transistor Count	53.9 billion	53.9 billion	29.7 billion	13.3 billion	13.3 billion
Die Size	357 mm²	357 mm²	199 mm²	204 mm²	204 mm²
Compute Units	64	56	32	32	32
Ray Accelerators	64	56	32	32	32
Stream Processors	4096	3584	2048	2048	2048
Game GPU Clock	2400 MHz	2070 MHz	2530 MHz	2470 MHz	2250 MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2970 MHz	Up to 2520 MHz	Up to 3130 MHz	Up to 2755 MHz	Up to 2625 MHz
ROPs	128	128	64	64	64
AMD Infinity Cache	64MB	64MB	32MB	32MB	32MB
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8/16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Data Rate	20 Gbps	20 Gbps	20 Gbps	18Gbps	18Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	645 GB/s	645 GB/s	322 GB/s	288 GB/s	288 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Board Power	304W	220W	160W	190W	165W

First, let's take a quick look at the specs. The RX 9060 XT is built on the new Navi 44 die, measuring just 199mm², and it's worth pointing out this is a monolithic chip, so AMD is not using a chiplet-based design as per RDNA 3. In total, Navi 44 silicon packs in 29.7 billion transistors.

As a full implementation of Navi 44, the RX 9060 XT packs in 32 Compute Units, and each CU houses 64 Stream Processors, for a total of 2048 shaders. There's also 32 Ray Accelerators – one per CU – and 64 ROPs.

As for clock speed, the RX 9060 XT has the highest speeds of any RDNA 4 GPU so far, given it sports a rated game clock of 2530MHz and a boost clock of up to 3130MHz.

The memory configuration offers either 8 or 16GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 20Gbps, operating over a 128-bit memory interface, for total memory bandwidth of 322 GB/s. 32MB of Infinity Cache is also present.

Power draw for the RX 9060 XT is rated at 160W Total Board Power (TBP), but we are using our updated GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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