XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air Review

Introduction

We have with us the XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air. This is the company’s most premium custom-design rendition of AMD’s new performance-segment GPU that’s making waves for restoring competition. The XFX Mercury OC comes with the company’s heaviest and most capable cooling solution with an innovative and tool-free fan removal design. It also comes with a powerful VRM solution and a triple 8-pin power connector setup to ensure adequate overclocking headroom, given that the RX 9070 XT will be the top graphics card in the RX 9000 series.

The new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is designed to offer maxed out gaming experiences at 1440p, including with ray tracing, as well as 4K Ultra HD gaming at acceptable performance levels. The GPU is based on AMD’s latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture that offers a generational leap in performance per compute unit (CU) over the previous RDNA 3, allowing AMD to create a lean GPU that can remain competitive even as prices drop over time. The biggest strides AMD has taken are in the areas of ray tracing performance and AI acceleration.

The new RDNA 4 RT engine offers a 100% gain in ray tracing performance, lowering the cost of enabling it in games. Advances made in AI acceleration throughput paved the way for AMD to innovate FSR 4, the biggest update to its performance enhancement technology suite so far. FSR 4 uses an AI ML-based upscaling algorithm to reconstruct details in upscaled frames. This offers significant improvements to image quality at every performance preset over FSR 3.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is based on the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon, which it maxes out. The company built this generation of GPUs on the TSMC N4P foundry node, which improves efficiency over the TSMC N5 node that the previous generation Navi 31 and Navi 32 chips used for their compute dies. Navi 48 is a traditional monolithic chip, and not a chiplet-based one, and so all components, including the memory controllers and Infinity Cache, are built on the newer node, resulting in a significantly smaller chip than Navi 31, but at comparable transistor counts.

The RX 9070 XT gets all 64 RDNA 4 compute units (CUs) present on the Navi 48, resulting in 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, and 64 ray accelerators. Other key specs include 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The RX 9070 XT comes with 16 GB of memory across a 256-bit memory bus, but this is the older generation GDDR6, running at 20 Gbps, and yielding 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD probably chose the older GDDR6 to give itself better headroom to wage price-wars against its competition, by relying on architecture-level innovations to overcome comparatively lower bandwidth when compared to the competition, namely the RTX 5070 Ti.

The XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air offers the company’s highest factory overclock, with a 2570 MHz Game clock compared to 2400 MHz reference. It features a unique set of axial airflow fans that are held in place with a magnetic interlock. The back of the fan hub and the base of the fan frame come with circular grooves that are magnetized. These grooves have the fan’s electrical traces running through them. You pull the fans out of the cooler manually, but without needing any tools. This allows you to keep the fans and portions of the heatsink underneath clean. The cooler also comes with a tastefully executed RGB lighting setup along the top-edge. There are enthusiast features such as dual-BIOS and ARGB headers to sync your rig’s lighting to that of the card. XFX is pricing the RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Magnetic Air at $800, a whopping 33% premium over the $600 baseline price.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 3080	$420	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 4070	$490	5888	64	1920 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7800 XT	$440	3840	96	2124 MHz	2430 MHz	2425 MHz	Navi 32	28100M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6900 XT	$450	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6950 XT	$630	5120	128	2100 MHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$900	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 4070 Super	$590	7168	80	1980 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7900 GRE	$530	5120	160	1880 MHz	2245 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4070 Ti	$700	7680	80	2310 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RTX 5070	$550	6144	80	2325 MHz	2512 MHz	1750 MHz	GB205	31100M	12 GB, GDDR7, 192-bit
RTX 4070 Ti Super	$750	8448	112	2340 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 7900 XT	$620	5376	192	2000 MHz	2400 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	20 GB, GDDR6, 320-bit
RX 9070	$550	3584	128	2070 MHz	2520 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 9070 XT	$600	4096	128	2400 MHz	2970 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
XFX RX 9070 XT Mercury OC	$800	4096	128	2570 MHz	3100 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090 Ti	$1000	10752	112	1560 MHz	1950 MHz	1313 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 5070 Ti	$750	8960	96	2295 MHz	2452 MHz	1750 MHz	GB203	45600M	16 GB, GDDR7, 256-bit
RX 7900 XTX	$820	6144	192	2300 MHz	2500 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	24 GB, GDDR6, 384-bit
RTX 4080	$940	9728	112	2205 MHz	2505 MHz	1400 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RTX 4080 Super	$990	10240	112	2295 MHz	2550 MHz	1438 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RTX 5080	$1000	10752	112	2295 MHz	2617 MHz	1875 MHz	GB203	45600M	16 GB, GDDR7, 256-bit
RTX 4090	$2400	16384	176	2235 MHz	2520 MHz	1313 MHz	AD102	76300M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 5090	$2000	21760	176	2017 MHz	2407 MHz	1750 MHz	GB202	92200M	32 GB, GDDR7, 512-bit