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AMD’s RX 9060 XT could beat the RX 9070 in an unexpected way

The RX 7600 XT graphics card on a pink background.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

While Nvidia is getting ready to expand its list of the best graphics cards, AMD is also not resting on its laurels. We expect to see the RX 9060 XT and non-XT this year, but details are slim. Today’s leak fills in some important blanks about the possible specs of the card, and one specification in particular stands out as a huge upgrade over not just the predecessor, but also the flagship RX 9000 GPUs.

This leak comes from VideoCardz which appears to be using its own sources this time. It’s unclear whether it’s true, so take it all with a huge grain of salt — but as long as you’re ready for some delightful speculation, let’s dive right in.

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The publication claims that the RX 9060 XT will feature two memory configurations, including 8GB and 16GB variants. This isn’t unexpected; we’ve already seen AMD adopt this approach in the RX 7600 XT, and Nvidia is likely to use it in the RTX 5060 Ti, too.

The downside for AMD compared to Nvidia is that Team Red will only equip the GPU with GDDR6 memory running at 20Gbps; a major downgrade compared to Nvidia’s GDDR7. If the RX 9060 XT sports a 128-bit memory bus (just like the previous generation has), it’ll have very limited bandwidth as a result.

AMD board partners reportedly claim that the RX 9060 XT will sport 2,048 stream processors (SPs). This is not unexpected, as the RX 9060 XT is essentially meant to be an RX 9070 XT cut in half, and that GPU comes with 4,096 cores (which is essentially what the SPs are).

The truly interesting part comes in the form of majorly boosted clock speeds. The RX 9060 XT is said to come with a 2,620MHz game clock and a massive boost clock of 3,230MHz. Yes, that’s right: 3.2GHz clock speeds on a budget-friendly card. Whether this turns out to be true or not is uncertain, but that’d be a major uplift for AMD and could make up for the limited bandwidth.

Lastly, the GPU is said to use a 500-watt power supply that might need to be upgraded to 550W if the model is overclocked, and it’ll feature three display connectors as opposed to four.

I won’t lie, this leak sounds almost too good to be true, but the RX 9070 XT finally managed to break past the 3GHz barrier, so it’s possible that this will be proven right in a couple of months. AMD is rumored to announce the RX 9060 XT at Computex in May.

Monica J. White
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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