GIGABYTE AORUS Radeon RX 9070 XT ELITE Review – Jackpot, AMD!

Update @ 15:02 March 7, 2025: Added local pricing.

This time around, AMD is taking a step back for its Radeon division and focuses its resources on serving the mainstream segments with its RDNA 4 lineup, officially the Radeon RX 9000 series. With the so-called “halo effect” now out of the way, the top card this time around is the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is exclusively available in AIB models – for this review, AMD sent us GIGABYTE’s top variant under its AORUS sub-brand, so let’s see if AMD finally answers back to NVIDIA’s GPU dominance.

Unboxing

AMD has slightly updated its branding guidelines for the new RX 9070 cards – instead of the bright red, the GPU branding is now predominantly black with a red line in the front of the packaging (still plenty of red elsewhere). Opening the inner box reveals the documentation first, then the full set of accessories, mostly the components for the GPU stand assembly, accompanies the GPU itself.

Here’s all the items you’ll get, with the only non-functional part being the AORUS badge. All the other parts account for the stand assembly, including the screws that directly bolts onto the far side of the GPU. Since AMD has maintained the use of PCIe 8-pin connectors, you won’t find any adapters here like NVIDIA-based cards do.

Walkaround

One of the key characteristics of this card is the counter-rotating 7-blade “hawk fan”, which feature quite a few intricacies that you don’t necessarily find in most other cards. Unlike the ring fan designs, this fan blade features a winglet on the side, along with jagged trailing edge that, going by the principle of aircraft engines, is likely for reducing fan noise. On the inner section there’s also “ribs” that runs along the circumference of the blades.

As with most card designs, the far side of the card features a flow-through section for the 3rd fan, though this design obscures it more than others. We can also see the triple PCIe 8-pin connectors being quite recessed from the card’s tallest point, and that should allow for a comfortable bend radius for the cables.

Given that this is a 340W card, the footprint of this card is decently significant, though not to the extent of cards like RTX 4090 or even some RTX 4080. By modern GPU standards, the size is decent that you should have no issues fitting it in most cases, one can also see the heatsinks are packed fairly tight, which relies on fans with higher static pressure to work (this typically creates more fan noise) in exchange for tighter overall footprint.

One thing I should mention on the PCIe power connectors is the small bit of extruded metal on the right side. I recommend inserting the rightmost connector first, as attempting to reseat the cable when the 2 additional pins slip away cause the cable to catch the corner when I pull it out, and I had to redo this a few times to finally get the cables in properly. Quite a bit more work over installing the 12V-2×6, but at least there’s no worries on fire risk given its track record on NVIDIA’s cards right now. Besides the connectors, you’ll also find the BIOS switch with two profiles to use.

The GPU does come with a unique mounting system unlike most cards – there are mounting points for the screws to bolt on with the included GPU stand, though the assembly process is quite a bit more complicated than I’d like. Still, this is entirely optional – and if you have a decently new case, some of them already have built-in GPU support bracket that serves the same purpose.

For I/O, the card features a pair of DisplayPort 2.1a and a pair of HDMI 2.1b ports, both capable of outputting 8K resolutions with AMD’s Radiance Display Engine. Here, you can also visualize the thickness and the height of the card, which measures within 3 slots of thickness and is relatively tall.

There are a quite a few lighting zones on this card – three inside the fans along with a small bit on the right, plus one at the top, and one at the back. If you like light shows on GPUs, this certainly ticks that check box. The RGB settings is configurable through the GIGABYTE Control Center (GCC) app, which we’ll get to in a bit.

Specifications

GIGABYTE AORUS Radeon RX 9070 XT ELITE 16GB GDDR6

Full specifications available on product page.

GPU Core & VRAM: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
GPU Core Variant	Navi 48 XT
Microarchitecture	RDNA 4
Process Node	TSMC N4P
Transistors	53.9 billion
Die size	357mm²
Compute Units (CUs)	64
ROPs / TMUs	128 / 256
Stream Processors	4096
AI Accelerators	128
RT Accelerators	64
Cache	64MB L3 (Infinity Cache)
VRAM Configuration	16GB GDDR6 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	19.5Gbps, 644.6GB/s peak
Add-in board: GIGABYTE AORUS Radeon RX 9070 XT ELITE
Fan Layout	Triple front counter-rotating axial fans (single flow-through)
Core Clocks	(TBD as of publishing)
TDP (TBP)	340W
Factory Recommended PSU	850W
Dual BIOS Mode	Yes (Performance Mode / Silent Mode)
Display Outputs	2x DisplayPort 2.1a 2x HDMI 2.1b *Max output resolution: 7680×4320 (8K)
Power Connector	3x PCIe 8-pin connector
Bus Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16
Dimensions	3-slot, 339 x 136 x 59 mm

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K
Cooling	Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux 30th Anniversary Edition Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex
GPU	> GIGABYTE AORUS Radeon RX 9070 XT ELITE
Memory	Kingston FURY BEAST RGB DDR5-6800 CL34 (2x16GB) *configured to DDR5-6400 CL32 XMP profile
Storage	ADATA LEGEND 960 MAX 1TB
Power Supply	Cooler Master MWE Gold 1250 V2 Full Modular (ATX12V 2.52) 1250W
Case	VECTOR Bench Case (Open-air chassis)
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 24H2

Performance

All benchmarks are done in out-of-the-box settings under Performance Mode – for gaming benchmarks, upscaling and frame generation features such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS are turned off unless otherwise specified in the chart.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Like the AMD GPUs that came before it, the new RX 9070 XT retains similar performance characteristics as its predecessor – meaning, great rasterization performance, and relatively weak ray tracing performance. As seen in the chart above, the Radeon has no problem outperforming the RTX 4080 SUPER, and keeps it pretty close to the COLORFUL RTX 5080 at times. However, ray tracing sees the Radeon GPU fall behind both NVIDIA cards by a sizeable margin.

Gaming Benchmarks

We’re honestly surprised with how much gaming performance the Radeon RX 9070 XT can put out, especially when given the extra power over the standard 304W TBP that AMD’s official specs say. This OC version has a 340W TBP – 36W more than standard – and our benchmarks show the card capable of keeping up with the RTX 5080 in raster graphics performance, which is plenty impressive on AMD’s part.

Ray tracing, however, continues to be one of the shortcomings of AMD GPUs, though the performance is still somewhat decent, all things considered; one big caveat here is the performance on Black Myth: Wukong, which punishes AMD’s GPU architecture especially hard with massive framerate deficit compared to Team Green’s counterparts.

Thermals

Despite the rather thirsty 340W board power draw, the silicon itself is very well cooled under Performance mode, staying at 55°C for the rest of the 10-minute Furmark stress test starting at minute two; that being said, the VRAMs do get quite toasty compared to the core itself, reaching as high as 92°C in Silent mode.

Additionally, AMD’s telemetry conveniently tells us that the GPU itself pulls around 288 watts at maximum, while the memory modules consume around 32 watts (not shown in the graphs). Despite that, fan noise are hardly discernible regardless of vBIOS profiles, with the thermals managed fairly well, so that’s solid work on GIGABYTE’s part.

Interestingly, 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, which typically pushes VRAM harder in our tests, actually sees slightly lower temperatures across the board – at Performance mode, VRAM temperatures peaks at 85°C, while Silent mode brought it up to 90°C. Average core temperatures are largely identical, staying at 55°C and 61°C respectively, though the hotspot temperatures do get higher by a small margin. Still, such a big delta in these values tells us that the heat spread may be uneven, and this can be caused by uneven mounting pressure of the thermal interface.

Software

The software responsible for GPU customization is the GIGABYTE Control Center (GCC) app, which allows you adjust RGB lighting, fan controls, and overclocking. I recommend using AMD Software for the latter two as we suspect the software or the driver is causing conflicts on fan profiles, which causes the GPU to run on a very unnatural CPU-like fan curve (see image above) on every system restart. This is most likely a bug, but I think it’s worth pointing out just in case.

Verdict

There’s a bit of a running joke among the PC community that AMD “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” – this is in reference to the chipmaker’s pricing strategy in recent years boiling down to NVIDIA’s prices minus $50, which simply isn’t compelling for most, especially given NVIDIA’s superior software ecosystem and driver track record.

This time, Team Green is facing several issues on their new RTX 50 series GPUs – melting connectors, missing ROPs, stability issues, stock mayhem, overpriced MSRPs, and then some – which presents what looks to be a rare opportunity for AMD to capitalize, and capitalize they certainly did. The Radeon RX 9070 XT has perhaps overperformed most people’s expectations this time, and with the pricing that’s finally not looking a price gouging attempt, we can confidently say Team Red finally has a winner in their hands.

For GIGABYTE’s part, while it’s generally a solid card, there’s bits of improvements that can be done. The GPU thermals is generally well managed, though the VRAM is definitely sitting on the hotter side; while this can be mitigated with a more aggressive fan curve, we do think this can be improved with a better cooling layout (or simply a more even contact) that takes care of both memory and hotspot temperatures.

This particular card, with extra 36 watts on top of the vanilla model, currently don’t have a published price – but it’s safe to assume this will feature some level of markup as it is an “overclocked” variant with extra performance on tap. You can adjust your expectations based on the published price when GIGABYTE announced them later on (update @ March 7: pricing is RM3,899), but as far as AMD’s RDNA 4 generation goes – I think it’s good to say that they didn’t miss the opportunity this time around.

Special thanks to AMD Malaysia for providing the GIGABYTE AORUS Radeon RX 9070 XT ELITE card for this review.