AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT looms on the horizon, readying to enter the midrange GPU space with a boost clock that exceeds expectations. According to the latest rumours, it’ll supposedly boast the highest factory frequency yet, going so far as eclipse Radeon RX 9070
According to VideoCardz, Radeon RX 9060 XT will feature 2,048 Streaming Processors, spread among 32 Compute Units. These will be clocked at 2,620MHz Game and 3,230MHz boost, respectively marking a 550MHz and 710MHz increase over RX 9070. Overclocked models could even reach 3,300MHz.
This also makes it the highest-factory-clocked GPU ever, beating even RTX 5090 at 2,407MHz and Colorful iGame RTX 4090 Kudan at 3,088MHz using the OC BIOS. Unfortunately, running faster won’t magically make this small GPU perform better than these silicon monsters. Best case, it will bring it closer to its bigger RX 9070 sibling.
Navi 44 XT is expected to pair with either 8GB or 16GB of VRAM, similar to what Nvidia is planning with its RTX 5060 Ti. The difference, however, is that AMD will use slower 20Gb/s GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus against Nvidia’s 28Gb/s GDDR7. This combo results in 320GB/s of bandwidth for RX 9060 XT, which is less than its competition and half of what RX 9070 gets access to. Thus, performance may be impacted in bandwidth-demanding games.
| RX 9070 | RX 9060 XT | RX 7600 XT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 56 | 32 | 32 |
| Stream Processors | 3,584 | 2,048 | 2,048 |
| Game Clock | 2,070MHz | 2,620MHz | 2,470MHz |
| Boost Clock | 2,520MHz | 3,230MHz | 2,755MHz |
| Memory | 16GB | 8GB or 16GB | 16GB |
| GDDR6 Speed | 20 Gbps | 20 Gbps | 18 Gbps |
| Bus width | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| PCIe | 5.0 | TBC | 4.0 |
Now, the question is, how much will this higher frequency impact efficiency? As you may know, the higher you push silicon chips, the worse they become at power efficiency due to power leakage, among other things. In other words, the further you go, the less you get for each watt of power consumed thanks to diminishing returns. Additionally, more power also means more heat, demanding larger cooler and PSU requirements. On the other hand, those who like underclocking hardware should have more room to play before seeing big performance reductions.
All that is left to know is the price and power consumption – which is unlikely to exceed the RX 9070’s 220W. Unless AMD releases it earlier, we should learn more about this GPU in about a month, during Computex.
