Introduction

We have with us the XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air. This is the company’s most premium custom-design rendition of AMD’s new performance-segment GPU that’s making waves for restoring competition. The XFX Mercury OC comes with the company’s heaviest and most capable cooling solution with an innovative and tool-free fan removal design. It also comes with a powerful VRM solution and a triple 8-pin power connector setup to ensure adequate overclocking headroom, given that the RX 9070 XT will be the top graphics card in the RX 9000 series.

The new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is designed to offer maxed out gaming experiences at 1440p, including with ray tracing, as well as 4K Ultra HD gaming at acceptable performance levels. The GPU is based on AMD’s latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture that offers a generational leap in performance per compute unit (CU) over the previous RDNA 3, allowing AMD to create a lean GPU that can remain competitive even as prices drop over time. The biggest strides AMD has taken are in the areas of ray tracing performance and AI acceleration.

The new RDNA 4 RT engine offers a 100% gain in ray tracing performance, lowering the cost of enabling it in games. Advances made in AI acceleration throughput paved the way for AMD to innovate FSR 4, the biggest update to its performance enhancement technology suite so far. FSR 4 uses an AI ML-based upscaling algorithm to reconstruct details in upscaled frames. This offers significant improvements to image quality at every performance preset over FSR 3.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is based on the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon, which it maxes out. The company built this generation of GPUs on the TSMC N4P foundry node, which improves efficiency over the TSMC N5 node that the previous generation Navi 31 and Navi 32 chips used for their compute dies. Navi 48 is a traditional monolithic chip, and not a chiplet-based one, and so all components, including the memory controllers and Infinity Cache, are built on the newer node, resulting in a significantly smaller chip than Navi 31, but at comparable transistor counts.

The RX 9070 XT gets all 64 RDNA 4 compute units (CUs) present on the Navi 48, resulting in 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, and 64 ray accelerators. Other key specs include 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The RX 9070 XT comes with 16 GB of memory across a 256-bit memory bus, but this is the older generation GDDR6, running at 20 Gbps, and yielding 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD probably chose the older GDDR6 to give itself better headroom to wage price-wars against its competition, by relying on architecture-level innovations to overcome comparatively lower bandwidth when compared to the competition, namely the RTX 5070 Ti.

The XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air offers the company’s highest factory overclock, with a 2570 MHz Game clock compared to 2400 MHz reference. It features a unique set of axial airflow fans that are held in place with a magnetic interlock. The back of the fan hub and the base of the fan frame come with circular grooves that are magnetized. These grooves have the fan’s electrical traces running through them. You pull the fans out of the cooler manually, but without needing any tools. This allows you to keep the fans and portions of the heatsink underneath clean. The cooler also comes with a tastefully executed RGB lighting setup along the top-edge. There are enthusiast features such as dual-BIOS and ARGB headers to sync your rig’s lighting to that of the card. XFX is pricing the RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air at $800, a whopping 33% premium over the $600 baseline price.