Overall and Final Verdict

With all of the testing done and out of the way we can finally step back and get a look at how the new RX 9060 XT and with that the ASRock RX 9060 XT Challenger OC performed. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC that AMD sent over is an overclocked card, so we do need to keep that in mind. But as far as performance goes the RX 9060 XT averaged 183 FPS at 1080p, 127 FPS at 1440p, and at 4k 67 FPS. Those numbers show us that the card can perform at all three resolutions if needed but we also know that at 4k only half of the results were over 60 FPS with some down as low as just over 30 FPS. The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC handles anything thrown at it at 1080p with a lot of those being ready for high refresh displays. Gaming at 1440p is possible as well, but the most demanding games will still struggle a little. AMD made big improvements in both power usage and power efficiency when compared to the RX 7700 XT and the older RX 6750 XT which otherwise performed similarly to the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC. The only area where it didn’t excel were the tests with ray tracing, but even there they have made big strides, Nvidia is still ahead there though.

The RX 9060 XT Challenger OC itself has a nice relatively compact design. It is taller but they are utilizing space that would already be used with the power cable up on top and the dual fan design is a lot easier to fit in most builds compared to the triple fan cards and 3+ slot cards that you see with a lot of the higher end cards. I was concerned with the heatsink design being a horizontal layout, especially with the fan shroud blocking airflow that might go out the PCI bracket. But it didn’t perform badly in our tests, it just didn’t have much headroom left over. Its noise performance was great when under load and good at 100% fan speed but struggled some at 50% fan speed for some reason. The card design as a whole was a little too aggressive for me with a lot going on with the fan shrouds design.

The RX 9060 Ti is available in 8GB and 16GB variants and with that, it has two different prices. I do think that I would prefer to see two different model names for cards like this that have two different memory capacities. That isn’t AMD specific at all, they have both done it multiple times through the years. But there are areas where that memory capacity will change the card's performance, namely at 4k and 1440p sometimes. For the 1080p market which AMD is targeting that will be less of an issue, however. The 8GB RX 9060 Ti has an MSRP of $299 and the 16GB model we have here is $349. The graph above puts together Time Spy Extreme performance along with both MSRP and current card pricing for the cheapest card of that specific GPU. Given today's market, we can’t just go by MSRP.  With the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC, we don’t know what the market price will eventually be so we can only go by its MSRP. That said its performance even when looking at MSRPs puts it only behind the RX 9070 and at the top of the chart with current prices. A lot of people will see how the RX 9060 XT Challenger OC performed similarly to the RX 6750 XT and the RX 7700 XT and wonder why you wouldn’t get one of those and that might be the case when looking at used cards. But both of those cards are way down the chart here because of their current market prices. At the end of the day, if you are looking to game at 1080p the RX 9060 XT is a great option. Especially if you can get it at or near its listed MSRP. We will have to see tomorrow how that goes with the pricing of overclocked and aftermarket cards often coming in a lot higher.

Live Pricing: HERE