The Radeon RX9070XT / RX9070 Owners Thread

gpuerrilla · 30 Mar 2025 at 12:19

WARburton said:
its a strange one, normally if you have a CPU bottle neck you would expect to see the CPU at 100%ish
the low clock speeds on the GPU is just because it dosent need to boost.

I had to monitor the individual threads and not the collective register that some of the monitoring tools use when it comes to the cpu. The complimentary indicator that your gpu is not getting used is checking its saturation %. Just because you cannot assume if the cpu is not 100% you are not bottlenecked. It will be hard on games because many of them do not use the multi-cores/threads well anyway.

Drizmod · 30 Mar 2025 at 12:33

WARburton said:
its a strange one, normally if you have a CPU bottle neck you would expect to see the CPU at 100%ish
the low clock speeds on the GPU is just because it dosent need to boost.

is bios upto date and did you do a full driver reinstall when you first got it,

Fresh windows install everything updated including bios. I'm not home now so will look at sync

Case1987 · 30 Mar 2025 at 12:52

michty_me said:
Looks like my Pulse should be delivered on Tuesday. They were in stock elsewhere.
Not sure if I should hold onto the Nitro+ or just cancel it now.
What differences between the two in UV/OC, is it a drastic difference?

Definitely not, it's a few fps at best

audiemurth · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:02

Acquired a Sapphire 9070 Nitro recently at a hard to refuse price, last few cards I've purchased have been the Asus tuf series (7800xt,7900gre) as there cooling is second to none.
This 9070 nitro more or less matches them, is very quiet and am very surprised that the core boosts to 3000 and over in some games, all I've done is -10 on the mv setting and nothing else.
According to the specification boost clock is 2700 so maybe I have a little gem here, Really nice clean cut looking card, well done Sapphire

michty_me · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:26

Case1987 said:
Definitely not, it's a few fps at best

Ok great, thanks. Be as well save myself some Dosh then.

BS Dave · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:29

How much better is the Nitro xt over the pulse? I've seen a pulse for 620 and a nitro for 685. Is it worth the extra £65? I like the looks but...

adidan · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:33

BS Dave said:
How much better is the Nitro xt over the pulse? I've seen a pulse for 620 and a nitro for 685. Is it worth the extra £65? I like the looks but...

Is the nitro version 10% better than the pulse in performance and do you want flashing lights

Guess those are the only questions you need to answer.

WARburton · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:49

BS Dave said:
How much better is the Nitro xt over the pulse? I've seen a pulse for 620 and a nitro for 685. Is it worth the extra £65? I like the looks but...

my none XT nitro bench's at stock XT speeds.
the nitro cooler is massive so the card runs silent, and it as a higher power limit alowing it to strech its legs.

muon · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:50

The Pulse also runs very quietly. It was the quietest card in TPUs testing. Quieter and cooler than the Nitro.

Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse Review

Sapphire’s Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse trades flashy extras for substance, to hit its $600 MSRP. There's no RGB lighting or factory overclock, but you get an outstanding cooler that runs whisper-quiet at full load with good temperatures. Performance where it counts.

www.techpowerup.com

WARburton · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:53

muon said:
The Pulse also runs very quietly. It was the quietest card in TPUs testing. Quieter and cooler than the Nitro.

Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse Review

Sapphire’s Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse trades flashy extras for substance, to hit its $600 MSRP. There's no RGB lighting or factory overclock, but you get an outstanding cooler that runs whisper-quiet at full load with good temperatures. Performance where it counts.

www.techpowerup.com

by 1db, at a lower power limit and a lower bench mark score
there was 80rpm differance on the fan speed

muon · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:54

WARburton said:
by 1db, at a lower power limit and a lower bench mark score
there was 80rpm differance on the fan speed

Quiet nevertheless and overclocks +10% in performance.

Noise and power normalised, not much in it.

ICDP · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:56

My pulse 9070 XT is hardly a silicone lottery winner but even at -50 mV and + 10% Power Limit, it gives ~10% higher than stock.

Basically you might get ~3% better out of a silicone lottery winner 9070 XT Nitro. But that’s using 10% more power.

3% just isn’t worth it IMHO

WARburton · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:56

muon said:
Quiet nevertheless and overclocks +10% in performance.

Noise and power normalised, not much in it.

tbf the ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi OC did very good on that chart too

muon · 30 Mar 2025 at 13:59

I am impressed that the lower end 9070 XT cards are performing this well in terms of cooling. The lowest end 5070 Ti cards, run much warmer. The Shadow which the rainforest sold 500+ of this week, has 3 heatpipes, one fewer than the already hot running Ventus.

I've actually cancelled my MSRP 5070 Ti order and gone for the 9070 XT at £620.

AMD have finally solved idle power consumption as well for multiple/high-refresh monitors.

WARburton · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:03

muon said:
I've actually cancelled my MSRP 5070 Ti order and gone for the 9070 XT at £620.

at £620 the card is amazing. its almost like the good old day of GPU's

peahead · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:13

I see an Acer Predator branded 9070XT and Nitro model are up for pre order, i wonder who makes those for them ?

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/acer-predator-radeon-rx-9070-xt-oc-16gb-gddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gra-acr-04813.html

BS Dave · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:21

Ordered the Pulse

Kirkatron · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:33

ICDP said:
My pulse 9070 XT is hardly a silicone lottery winner but even at -50 mV and + 10% Power Limit, it gives ~10% higher than stock.

Basically you might get ~3% better out of a silicone lottery winner 9070 XT Nitro. But that’s using 10% more power.

3% just isn’t worth it IMHO

muon said:
Quiet nevertheless and overclocks +10% in performance.

Noise and power normalised, not much in it.

It's memory heat issues the Pulse suffers from under full load. This effects performance over long runs as the card throttles the memory.
Gamers Nexus did a teardown to find out why the hotspot and mem temps were so high. Basically just down to basic construction done to a budget. I believe there was over 30 degree differential between hotspot and GPU temps. They came to the conclusion the hotspot wasn't an issue but the mem temp was.
It's a very good card, probably the best budget one, but under full load the mem temps aren't great and benchmarks aren't long enough to show the impact of this.
It would be good to see the impact in a long gaming session.

TPU did record the average GPU clock speed for both Nitro and Pulse though. Nitro averaged 3239 and Pulse averaged 3078.

Gamers Nexus on Mem Temps of the Pulse: "Either way, it’s not in throttling territory and is still OK, but the memory temperature is a problem: It’s running at 90 degrees Celsius. The reason for this isn’t anything beyond Sapphire’s cooler design being relatively simple and its fan curve being relaxed as it is becomes a problem."

https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/tearing-down-sapphires-rx-9070-xt-pulse-thermals-fan-response-noise

brakeinup · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:38

I seem to be having issues with my 9070XT Pulse.

Desktop stuff is fine. Across multiple games (DayZ, Cyberpunk, Generation Zero, Atomfall, etc) I will play for an amount of time, sometimes its immediate and sometimes I can be 30 minutes in the game, I will get a black screen and monitor loses its DisplayPort signal and switches to standby. My keyboard doesn't fully respond, but when I was in DayZ earlier I could still push-to-talk to another player and game was still running. I couldn't get to task manager or anything like that as there was no display.

I've tried DDU and AMD Cleaner to install latest and previous drivers. No change.

Have this in Event Log: Display driver amduw23g stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

2 minutes later this: Application RadeonSoftware has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware.

Anyone else seeing this behaviour? Looking online I can see many similar situation on older gen cards.

Journey · 30 Mar 2025 at 14:48

brakeinup said:
I've tried DDU and AMD Cleaner to install latest and previous drivers. No change.

Several things.

Check your motherboard BIOS is up to date, and you reset to defaults.
Do a true clean re-install of your OS e.g totally wipe your drive, and don't connect to the internet until you have installed your AMD chipset drivers (if Ryzen) and GPU drivers.
Check your PSU connection to your GPU/and PSU end, and make sure you are using separate 8-pin connectors, not two from the same cable.
Install one game only, that you are seeing the issue with then test that.