GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC Review – A Solid #2 In RDNA 4 Family

Update @ 15:06 March 7, 2025: added local pricing.

The second card in AMD’s new RDNA 4-powered lineup is the Radeon RX 9070, and once again we were given a GIGABYTE unit, this time in the GAMING OC variant, for this review. Like its bigger brother, this model has no first-party MBA (Made by AMD) models, so all the cards you’ll get from this GPU will be from AIBs only. With that, let’s give this card a good look.

Unboxing

Similar to the RX 9070 XT card we unboxed in this review, the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC greets you with an inner box, which gives you just two things, as laid out in the image below:

Yep – all you get out of this box is simply a quick start guide, and the GPU itself. Nothing else, simple and straightforward.

Walkaround

Taking a closer look at the GPU, we see the same “Hawk Fan” design as the AORUS counterpart, with the winglets and jagged trailing edges that aims to improve airflow while reducing fan noise by carefully manipulating the turbulence. As a more “mainstream” model, the design are a tad more understated, with a simple cutout on the rear exposing a section of heatsinks for the third flow-through fan.

This card measures 288 x 132 x 50mm, which is quite small for a triple-fan design and will have no problem fit into most cases; there’s also noticeably less heatsinks with some heatpipes visible from the side view. As this card consumes only 245 watts at maximum, it only requires a pair of PCIe 8-pin connectors; the BIOS switch is situated on the left slightly obscured by the metal backplate.

Like the AORUS ELITE card we also reviewed, the GPU comes with two DisplayPort 2.1a outputs and two HDMI 2.1b outputs, both capable of outputting 8K resolutions. This is the same layout found on previous-gen GIGABYTE cards, so no surprises here.

The card generally feature a more understated design, with a small bit of RGB located on the top side – this is customizable through the GIGABYTE Control Center (GCC) app, which we’ll get to later in this review.

Specifications

GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC 16GB GDDR6

Full specifications available on product page.

GPU Core & VRAM: AMD Radeon RX 9070
GPU Core Variant	Navi 48 XL
Microarchitecture	RDNA 4
Process Node	TSMC N4P
Transistors	53.9 billion
Die size	357mm²
Compute Units (CUs)	56
ROPs / TMUs	128 / 224
Stream Processors	3584
AI Accelerators	112
RT Accelerators	56
Cache	64MB L3 (Infinity Cache)
VRAM Configuration	16GB GDDR6 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	20Gbps, 640GB/s peak
Add-in board: GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC
Fan Layout	Triple front counter-rotating axial fans (single flow-through)
Core Clocks	(TBD as of publishing)
TDP (TBP)	245W
Factory Recommended PSU	750W
Dual BIOS Mode	Yes (Performance Mode / Quiet Mode)
Display Outputs	2x DisplayPort 2.1a 2x HDMI 2.1b *Max output resolution: 7680×4320 (8K)
Power Connector	2x PCIe 8-pin connector
Bus Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16
Dimensions	2.5-slot, 288 x 132 x 50 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 Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC
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

For benchmarks, we compare the RX 9070 against the predecessor sitting on the same price point, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, along with its bigger brother and the NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 SUPER card. Generally, the RX 9070 stays reasonably close to RTX 4080’s scores, while having significant amounts of lead over the RX 7900 GRE – for just 70% of the core count, the new RX 9070 outperforms the GRE card convincingly in Time Spy benchmarks in particular.

Gaming Benchmarks

The Radeon RX 9070, in this case the GIGABYTE version with 245W of total board power to work with, mostly stays within striking distance to its bigger brother, while keeping up with the RTX 4080 SUPER in games that runs on rasterization. Ray tracing brought the card’s performance down a notch, as AMD’s ray tracing hardware, while significantly improved, still has ways to go before catching up on NVIDIA’s ray tracing prowess. Black Myth: Wukong is the outlier here, and we’ve confirmed via AMD’s data that this is not a bug – it is the expected performance in this game.

Thermals

Just like the AORUS RX 9070 XT we also reviewed, the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC exhibits similar behavior when it comes to thermals – while the GPU temperature is perfectly under control, VRAM temperatures are perhaps too high, comparatively speaking. It’s not thermal throttling territory though, so performance won’t be affected, but it’s also not ideal given that Silent Mode has allowed the modules to go as hot as 92°C.

For Time Spy Extreme stress test, we see the VRAM temperatures are slightly lower than Furmark tests, unlike most cases where this test pushes memory modules just a bit harder. The average GPU temperature, even under Silent Mode, doesn’t exceed 60°C, which is quite impressive on GIGABYTE’s part. Oddly, the fan speed behavior tends to be peaky with rise and fall every few seconds, though this doesn’t affect its noise characteristics, which is pretty much indiscernible from environmental noise.

Software

The GIGABYTE Control Center software can be used to customize the small bit of RGB lighting on this card, though this app also offers fan tuning and GPU overclocking features, along with software updater that gives you a summary of update status. That said, we observed a potential conflict with AMD Software which changed the GPU fan curve to a very aggressive CPU cooler-like behavior, so I recommend sticking to AMD’s own tools for the time being until this gets fixed.

Verdict

As the second model in the Radeon RX 9000 series, AMD’s MSRP ($549) for this card is not quite as good as the 9070 XT ($599), which is mostly seen as an upsell tactic to persuade would-be buyers into getting the better and slightly pricier GPU (which, to be fair, is a great card). As far as this GIGABYTE card is concerned, it’s still a pretty solid one – reasonably compact, decent thermals and noise, and offers performance that comes very close to an RTX 4080 SUPER in raster workloads.

While we currently don’t have official pricing from GIGABYTE at this minute – comparatively speaking, the RX 9070 XT is still the better deal of the two based on AMD’s official MSRP (update: price is RM3,229). If you have the budget for that card, go for that; that said, the RX 9070 is still a decent card that, as prices go down over time, should eventually sweeten the deal for those looking for a solid 1440p card at a (presumably) friendlier pricing.

Special thanks to AMD Malaysia for providing the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 9070 GAMING OC card for this review.