AMD’s RX 9070 XT beats Nvidia’s $1,000+ GPU, but there’s a catch
It turns out that some undervolting can do wonders for the AMD RX 9070 XT GPU. It managed to climb to new heights and beat Nvidia in a big way.
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AMD’s RX 9070 XT hit the shelves last week, and the response has been largely positive. The GPU was expected to perform on around the same level as Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, making it capable of beating some of the best graphics cards. However, a known overclocker just managed to push the GPU to new heights, helping it beat Nvidia’s $1,000+ RTX 5080.
Der8auer took the RX 9070 XT out for an extensive spin and achieved interesting results. Prior to launch, many thought the RX 9070 XT would rival the RTX 5070 at best, but now, we’ve seen it beating not just the RTX 5070 Ti but also the RTX 5080 in today’s test. The catch? Not only did Der8auer use a premium card, but the GPU was also overclocked and undervolted.
Overclocking a GPU is a whole process, as is undervolting. It can be very rewarding (it certainly was in this case), but also scary if you’re not used to it. Der8auer’s goal was to push the GPU to the advertised maximum clock speed, which is at 3,060MHz for the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil model. Just overclocking didn’t do the trick though; the YouTuber only achieved 3.1GHz when increasing the power limit to 110%. He then undervolted the card by 200mV, which caused it to crash. In the end, he was able to achieve a stable overclock when running at -170mV. At that voltage, the RX 9070 XT hit an impressive 3.4GHz, which is a frequency previously unheard of for many GPUs.
der8auerThe undervolting/overclocking did wonders for the RX 9070 XT. It managed to top the ranking of Der8auer’s benchmarks, beating even Nvidia’s RTX 5080 Founders Edition (albeit by a tiny, tiny margin).
This is a great result when you consider that the RTX 5080 costs $999 in the Founders Edition model. Meanwhile, the RX 9070 XT starts at $599, but this particular model adds a whopping $200 to that price tag, selling for $790. Both cards are currently sold out everywhere, so it’s a moot point, but still — it’s a smaller gap than you’d think.
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Der8auer also didn’t use ray tracing or path tracing in his Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, which could’ve given the RX 9070 XT a bit of an edge, as Nvidia is historically better at handling RT tasks. Besides, the RTX 5080 wasn’t overclocked, so it would’ve won if it was — but it’s still a nice win for AMD.
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
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