Card Layout and Photos
The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, like a lot of cards these days, has a black plastic fan shroud but unlike the PNY card I recently took a look at, this card has a lot more aggressive styling molded into the shroud. There is a mix of different things going on including two knurled sections between the fans and above the fans and a few indents and groves. Below the left fan it also has the Challenger branding in silver with a few other greys and it is hard to see but above the right fan has a glossy finish as well. With it being a dual fan card, it would be considered a relatively compact card these days with a length of 245 mm or just over 9 and a half inches long. It does stick out on the top with the top of the fan shroud sitting at 23mm over the top of the PCI bracket and they did a good job of keeping it all in a dual-slot package.
For the dual fans the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC has what ASRock is calling their Striped Axial Fan which has a polished surface on the back and a textured finish on the front of the fan blades. Each of the 11 blades has three raised lines on them as well. Which is where the striped in the fan name comes from. They do spin down and turn completely off under light workloads as well. One fan has the ASRock branding and the other had the Challender branding on the center cap and both fans are translucent so we can see through them and see the heatsink below. It also gives an even better look at how the blow-through design on the right fan works including a heatpipe that is visible behind the fan. The fan openings are 100mm but there is a hair more than 2mm on each side between it and the fan making the blades themselves 95mm.
Up on the top edge of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, a few things are going on. The fan shroud wraps around here with both the ASRock branding and Radeon branding printed in silver, one on each end. The ASRock branding also has a light diffuser just below it for the RGB lighting behind it. Also on top is the power connection and the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC uses a single 8-pin PCIe power connection. It sits at the end of the PCB putting it at about the 2/3 mark on the card itself and because the fan shroud sticks up higher this is at the PCB level and is recessed down into the card meaning all of the extra height of the card is using what would have been dead space.
Looking around at the top, bottom, and end edges of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC gives us a better look at how the cooling is set up. For starters, the aluminum heatsink is set up in a horizontal configuration which in my experience will run warmer, but we will test that later. That means that all of the air being pushed down into the card from the fans runs the length of the card except for the blow-through part near the end. The heatsink fins don’t go any higher than the top of the PCB but you do have heatpipes running on both the top and bottom which are pulling heat from on top of the GPU out and across the heatsink. At the end of the card, the fan shroud does still wrap around but the other half is open and we can see the exit for the heatsink here.
For display connections, the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC has just three connections in total, one less than we traditionally see. You get two DisplayPort connections and one HDMI with each having a label stamped into the PCI bracket. The PCI bracket is unfinished which stands out with the otherwise black card. It does have some ventilation cut out of it, but the vents are all very thin slots so there won’t be much blowing through here. The card design does push air in this direction which makes me wonder why there aren’t larger vents here and why we can see that the fan shroud drops down and blocks these vents even if they were more open.
The back of the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC does have a full-length metal backplate attached to it. This serves a few different purposes. The biggest one is that it helps give the card more strength to keep the PCB from sagging or flexing in the future. Beyond that, it does help protect the back of the PCB from physical damage. Lastly, because the card is longer than the PCB, it helps give the heatsink and the fan shroud structure at the end of the card. To help get some of that strength, on the PCB end of the card, the backplate wraps around the top with a small edge. The backplate itself is steel with a textured black finish on it. They use that textured finish in combination with glossy black paint to paint a design on the back of the card, similar to the design of the front fan shroud. That design has the ASRock branding in it and then they use silver to include the AMD Radeon branding and the Challenger model name as well, all of that branding is flipped upside down to make it readable when installed in most cases. The backplate does have a lot of cutouts in it, some for airflow like at the top of the card with six different cutouts as well as the two larger cutouts at the end of the card for the blow-through design. There is also a cutout area at the top of the card that gives access to the power plug and next to that, there is a small switch on the top edge of the PCB that lets you turn the RGB lighting on and off. The backplate also has a small sticker in the bottom corner near the PCI bracket, that has the model information as well as the serial number for the card on it.
Before getting into testing I did also get a picture of the lighting on the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC and ASRock has kept it very simple. You get a single diffused light bar on the top edge of the card above the left fan. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more lighting touches on other parts of the card. But I was happy to see that they didn’t add any backlit branding.
