AMD RX 9070 XT & RX 9070 non-XT thread (OC, undervolt, benchmarks, ...)

[LittleBro]

Please, share your experience with your RX 9070 (XT) GPU in this thread.

Where did you buy it? How much did it cost?
Post your benchmark results, OC and/or undervolt results. What tool did you use?
How do you feel about your purchase?

Thank you for your contribution.

 

[AVATARAT]

ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition +10% PL.
Overclock is dead.
We have something new that can be called optimization, so you can optimize the voltage relative to the current workload, and this will reduce the power consumption, which is limited at the bios level, so the card can get a few percent increase in MHz.
There are profiles so you can create one for each application to work as faster or efficient as you wish.

 

[Bad]

ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition +10% PL.
Overclock is dead.
We have something new that can be called optimization, so you can optimize the voltage relative to the current workload, and this will reduce the power consumption, which is limited at the bios level, so the card can get a few percent increase in MHz.
There are profiles so you can create one for each application to work as faster or efficient as you wish.

Well, that sucks.

What about extreme undervolt, then?

I noticed that power limiter on most 9070XTs only goes down to around 30%. Question is, what if someone wants to reduce power consumption by ~50% or so?

Are they out of luck?

 

[Lew Zealand]

Well, that sucks.

What about extreme undervolt, then?

I noticed that power limiter on most 9070XTs only goes down to around 30%. Question is, what if someone wants to reduce power consumption by ~50% or so?

Are they out of luck?

You should still be able to use lower clock speed (with voltage offset of course) to achieve this. Assuming those sliders go low enough. I find I generally like to target an efficient voltage like 0.90V or 0.80V and let the power (and to a lesser extent core clock) fluctuate as needed by the game load. All this in combination with VSync matched to game type. For me power management is half the fun of playing games.

 

[10tothemin9volts]

ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition +10% PL.
[..]

Could you please post your power scaling results, I would like to add them to my graph and post it. You can use e.g. 3DMark or any benchmark that utilizes the GPU fully. Simply run 3DMark with 100% power and note the score, then at 95% power and note the score, and so on until the lowest possible power level.

[..] Question is, what if someone wants to reduce power consumption by ~50% or so? [..]

I run my 4070 at -45% power (high efficiency is nice too after testing).

 

[AVATARAT]

Could you please post your power scaling results, I would like to add them to my graph and post it. You can use e.g. 3DMark or any benchmark that utilizes the GPU fully. Simply run 3DMark with 100% power and note the score, then at 95% power and note the score, and so on until the lowest possible power level.

I did something, is that what you want?

Well, that sucks.

What about extreme undervolt, then?

I noticed that power limiter on most 9070XTs only goes down to around 30%. Question is, what if someone wants to reduce power consumption by ~50% or so?

Are they out of luck?

I'm not sure why you need such a heavy undervolt but if you want really low consumption you better go for the 4070 ti, it's efficient and can drop to really low watts, the Radeon is not your way into this.

 

[AusWolf]

I got my Powercolor Reaper XT from Scan UK for £570 plus delivery. Current prices start at £680-700, which is sad.

I could say it's not bad, but I'll reserve judgement until Linux (Mesa) drivers come out of beta and the card receives full support.

All I can say at this point is that the GPU runs very cool, but the VRAM is a bit hot, but that's true of every other 9070 XT as I've seen.

 

[freeagent]

I got my Powercolor Reaper XT from Scan UK for £570 plus delivery.

I could say it's not bad, but I'll reserve judgement until Linux (Mesa) drivers come out of beta and the card receives full support.

All I can say at this point is that the GPU runs very cool, but the VRAM is a bit hot, but that's true of every other 9070 XT as I've seen.

 

[AusWolf]

I definitely had some change left for Chinese food, that much is certain.

 

[LittleBro]

I'm leaning towards getting Pulse RX 9070 XT from Sapphire. It's same card as PURE, a bit lower clocked.
What I find interesting regarding Pulse is that it is on par with ASUS RX 9070 XT TUF in terms of cooling.
This is kind of interesting, as TUF's cooler is a bit more robust and has two more heatpipes.

Although TPU's review of Pulse has not been published yet, you can find some information in already published comparison video:

 

[AusWolf]

I'm leaning towards getting Pulse RX 9070 XT from Sapphire. It's same card as PURE, a bit lower clocked.
What I find interesting regarding Pulse is that it is on par with ASUS RX 9070 XT TUF in terms of cooling.
This is kind of interesting, as TUF's cooler is a bit more robust and has two more heatpipes.

The TUF needs those extra heatpipes because it's an overclocked card with an increased TDP (hence the 3x 8-pin power connectors). The Sapphire Pulse isn't.

 

[LittleBro]

The TUF needs those extra heatpipes because it's an overclocked card with an increased TDP (hence the 3x 8-pin power connectors). The Sapphire Pulse isn't.

Yeah, I get it, I understand why ASUS went with 3x8pin. Still, 2 more heatpipes and more robust passive cooler for 30W more heat. Overkill?

 

[AusWolf]

Yeah, I get it, I understand why ASUS went with 3x8pin. Still, 2 more heatpipes and more robust passive cooler for 30W more heat. Overkill?

I guess so. The Powercolor Reaper does okay in my PC. Dual slot, dual 8-pin, 5 heatpipes, and I've got 60-65 ˚C core, 85 ˚C hotspot, 90 ˚C memory. It's in a m-ATX case with only one slot below to breathe.

I've never liked those obnoxious, bulky, big sandwich cards, to be honest.

 

[ratirt]

Did you guys confirm the undervolting thing with other cards than Powercolor's Red Devil?

 

[LittleBro]

PULSE, as per customer e-shop review, with undervolt can achieve average 3100 MHz clocks (def. is 2970 MHz) so it can get on par with TUF's performance at much lower TGP.
That ASRock Taichi defaultly eats up to 366W (up to 404W with +10 power limit) for what? +2% performance? Insane.
Looks like undervolting is way to go with RX 9070 (XT).

Overclocking memory:
By OCing your memory, you can actually degrade overall performance. OCed memory will require more power, thus will eat a bigger portion of card's power limit.
That leaves less power available for GPU, unless you increase power limit for whole card.

When OCing memory, after reaching certain memory clock, your GPU performance will start to degrade before memory starts to show signs of unstability (crashes).
That's because memory error correction will kick in once errors in VRAM emerge with higher clocks. Error correction requires computational resources, thus lowers performance.
Dude from Reddit shows these benchmark results for comparison: https://www.3dmark.com/sn/4297781, https://www.3dmark.com/sn/4297905.
When OCing VRAM, always do benchmarks and/or stress test in order to find setting (memory clock) when will the error correction start to degrade performance.

 

[NSR]

Can you guys explain what you mean by overclocking is dead? Can you no longer manually tune voltage/clocks/vram etc. in Adrenaline for 9070 cards?

 

[AusWolf]

Can you guys explain what you mean by overclocking is dead? Can you no longer manually tune voltage/clocks/vram etc. in Adrenaline for 9070 cards?

You can, but it's totally not worth it. See the post just above yours.

 

[NSR]

You can, but it's totally not worth it. See the post just above yours.

I see, thanks.

So in the TPU video above the non-XT is showing to be more impressive when it comes to OC.

 

[AusWolf]

I see, thanks.

So in the TPU video above the non-XT is showing to be more impressive when it comes to OC.

Possibly, because it operates at much lower power, with more headroom.

To be honest, I don't pay much (if any) attention to OC results these days.

 

[NSR]

Possibly, because it operates at much lower power, with more headroom.

To be honest, I don't pay much (if any) attention to OC results these days.

Lol, yeah it's one of those "I probably never will but I could" selling points. I've been told my 6800 overclocks well, I've done it once in 2 years.

 

[AVATARAT]

Can you guys explain what you mean by overclocking is dead? Can you no longer manually tune voltage/clocks/vram etc. in Adrenaline for 9070 cards?

You can set a higher frequency with the slider, but it's pointless because the card doesn't have enough power limit to use it.

PULSE, as per customer e-shop review, with undervolt can achieve average 3100 MHz clocks (def. is 2970 MHz) so it can get on par with TUF's performance at much lower TGP.
That ASRock Taichi defaultly eats up to 366W (up to 404W with +10 power limit) for what? +2% performance? Insane.
Looks like undervolting is way to go with RX 9070 (XT).

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Overclocking memory:
By OCing your memory, you can actually degrade overall performance. OCed memory will require more power, thus will eat a bigger portion of card's power limit.
That leaves less power available for GPU, unless you increase power limit for whole card.

When OCing memory, after reaching certain memory clock, your GPU performance will start to degrade before memory starts to show signs of unstability (crashes).
That's because memory error correction will kick in once errors in VRAM emerge with higher clocks. Error correction requires computational resources, thus lowers performance.
Dude from Reddit shows these benchmark results for comparison: https://www.3dmark.com/sn/4297781, https://www.3dmark.com/sn/4297905.
When OCing VRAM, always do benchmarks and/or stress test in order to find setting (memory clock) when will the error correction start to degrade performance.

Tuning is always better than stock for GPU/CPUs of the last few generations because they are over-volted in most cases.

GDDR6 has ECC error correction. So you won't notice any errors or glitches, but after a certain frequency the FPS will start to drop.
Of course, before that point you will gain more FPS from the high OC of the memory.
Of course, this will raise the temperature of the memory, so you need to cool it down.

With my 9070 XT GDDR6 it can clock at just over 2800 MHz and temperatures are between 72-80 °C.

 

[AusWolf]

Lol, yeah it's one of those "I probably never will but I could" selling points. I've been told my 6800 overclocks well, I've done it once in 2 years.

I get 'ya.
To me, it isn't even a selling point. A 5% difference is undetectable in basically every scenario in existence. Only reviews make a big deal out of it because they've got nothing better to say these days, unfortunately.
I'd much rather have my card nice and cool anyway.

 

[LittleBro]

Yeah, me too. I don't need OC, I want to maximize effectivity. Pulse, Swift and Hellhound have the best effectivity among RX 9070 XTs.
RX 9070 XT is seriously OCed straight from factory. As for RX 9070, that is one efficient piece of card.

I reckon sweet spot of RX 9070 XT being around 2.75 GHz with 230W. If the performance goes down by no more than 10% while TGP lowers by 85W, I say it's very much worth it.
When I finally get one in my hands, I'll do some benchmarks as to how efficiency of RX 9070 XT scales with clocks and voltages. I, too, like things cool & quiet and I choose GPU cooler accordingly.

Just for clarification: undervolting does not equal lowering power draw. Today's GPUs tend to boost until they hit power, current or temperature limit.
By undervolting you create power/thermal headroom. To actually lower power draw (force card no to boost anymore) one has to lower power limit as well, or limit clocks.

VRAM OC is not worth it because perf. increase is very minor and temps of VRAM on RX 9070 (XT)s are already too high.
You can squeeze much more perf. out of RX 9070 (XT) by undervolting GPU rather than OCing VRAM. OCing VRAM from like 2750 MHz to 2780 Mhz is absolutely pointless IMHO.

 

[10tothemin9volts]

I did something, is that what you want?
[..]

Thanks, I put it on my power scaling graph.

 

[SirKeldon]

First results after fiddling a little bit these last days with my Sapphire Pulse RX 9070. I ran several tests at stock to compare it against my previous 7800 XT, but for tuning I’ve gone step by step. Here’s a condensed summary based on Unigine Superposition 1080p extreme and a few Unigine Heaven (ultra w/3440x1440) runs. All tests were repeated 3 times per configuration. Percentages are based on FPS and point gains.

Stock Voltage / PL -5% → Slight FPS drop (-0.56%).
Stock Voltage / PL +5% → Roughly -7% performance. This made me suspect from a high stock voltage curve on my unit.

Undervolt tuning (PL stock)

• -50 to -75 mV → Gains in the 2–4% range.
• -75 to -95 mV → Gains ramped up to ~5–6%.
• (Note: only Superposition used here, as Heaven started crashing below -100 mV)
• -110 mV → Sweet spot. Best performance (~+6.63% over stock).
• -125 mV → Performance slightly dropped (+6.28%)

For now I’m running -90 mV, which gives me a solid +5.5% boost while staying on the safe side.

Also checked "real-world performance" and there's indeed a consistent 4–5% gain. Tested in Forza Horizon 5 (High/Ultra with RT ON) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (High/Ultra) at 3440x1440 native, confirming that the undervolt improvements reflect in actual gameplay too. During Forza 1h non-stop, max GPU clock reached 2914 MHz, with peak temps of 56°C (GPU), 84°C (VRAM) and 71°C (Hot Spot) // Room (ambient): 22-23ºC

I still plan to run a few more tests to confirm if the gains/stability hold across different workloads. Worth noting that only below -110/-125 mV I started to see a slight drop in actual GPU Power Max, around 5-6% lower than usual. Even with undervolt set at -90 mV, the card still reaches ~221.5W TBP and ~311W GPU Power Max

Next step will probably be playing around with Power Limit while keeping the undervolt, just to see if there’s an even better balance point between performance, efficiency, temps and power consumption.