In addition to the Radeon RX 9070, AMD launched their second RDNA 4 based GPU at the same time, the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The 9070 XT has 6 more RDNA 4 compute units, a higher boost clock, and a higher board power. The overclocked RX 9070 that AMD sent over was impressive. I’m excited today to take a look at the ASRock RX 9070 XT Steel Legend that they also sent over. The Steel Legend is available in white and black and are both ASRock’s stock-clocked options with their Taichi being their overclocked option. So I’m excited to see what the card is capable of, so let’s get to it.
Product Name: ASRock RX 9070 XT Steel Legend
Review Sample Provided by: AMD
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT?
The most interesting thing about AMDs new RDNA 4 architecture was the change in focus from the higher end to targeting the larger upper mid-range market with a targeted price of around $700. With that where some architectures are only focused on how to get the best possible performance, AMD wanted to find the best performance per dollar. RDNA 4 compute unit features an enhanced memory subsystem, improved scaler units, dynamic register allocation, increased efficiency per CU, and clock speeds that are a lot higher than RDNA 3. With all of that, they were able to improve performance per compute unit and offer (according to them) performance similar to their previous generation RX 7900 Series but with a lower compute unit count which helps keep the costs down.
They upgraded their Raytracing Accelerators to their third-generation design with a second ray intersection engine and optimized some of the overhead needed to execute raytracing calculations. This doubled the capabilities when compared to RDNA 3. They also have their 2nd generation AI Accelerators as well to improve performance in AI-accelerated games, content creation, and generative AI. They did this by adding new math pipelines for AI calculations, adding support for new data types like FP8, and support for inference optimization techniques like structured sparsity.
Exclusive to the new RDNA 4 cards, they also introduced FSR 4. FSR 4 improves image quality over FSR 3.1 with an ML-based algorithm designed to improve temporal stability, better preserve detail, and reduce ghosting. By utilizing features that were already part of the FidelityFX API when game developers integrated FSR 3.1, FSR 4 will be available on over 30 games at launch on the 9070 and 90070 XT. It’s always good when the game developers don’t have to push updates out to support!
I touched on it before that AMDs focus was on increasing value but one of the slides in their presentation caught my eye where they highlighted that they are aiming for 4k gaming at a 1440p price. They have the RX 9070 series targeted to sit in between their RX 7800 XT and XTX and the RX 7900 GRE for launch pricing with both 4K and 1440p gaming being possible.
Both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT have a lot fewer compute units than any of the 7900 Series cards but how do they compare to each other? The regular RX 9070 has 56 CUs to the XT’s 64. The same can be seen with the raytracing accelerators and for the AI accelerators, those numbers are just doubled up. The RX 9070 has a boost clock of 2.52 GHz and the XT is significantly higher at an impressive 2.97 GHz. You can see how much the clock speed changes things with the AI performance included in the chart, the XT has 14% more AI Accelerators but it does 33% more performance due to the clock speeds as well. Both cards have 16GB of VRAM which is needed for 4k gaming and both cards run on PCIe 5.0 at x16. They have DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b connections. Then for power with the lower clock speed, the RX 9070 has a board power of 220 watts whereas the XT is 304 watts.
Before getting into testing I also ran GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications listed below for the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has a clock speed of 2970 MHz which makes it a stock-clocked RX 9070 XT and GPUz does confirm that. I tested using the Beta 24.30.31.03 driver provided to the press by AMD and GPUz does also note the BIOS version of the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend just incase we need to know that in the future.
Packaging
The box for the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has 2/3 of the background on the front in white with different shades of light grey as accents and then a large black stripe on the right. The big red stripe that AMD used to use looks to be black now, we saw the same thing with the Acer RX 9070 as well. That has the AMD logo and the full Radeon RX 9070 XT model name. The white section has the ASRock logo up in the top right corner and a large logo for the Steel Legend brand. In the bottom left corner, there is a small red box that lets you know that this card has 16GB of VRAM. Around on the back, the background is split up between black and white again. In the black section, they highlight all of the AMD tech details and features. Then on the white section, ASRock has six pictures, each showing a different feature of the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend. This includes touching on the RGB lighting, the triple fan design, the metal backplate, silent cooling, the reinforced frame, and the striped ring fan design. Each of those has a one-line description of the feature as well to add a little more information. Personally, I’m just happy that there are pictures of the card itself here, shopping in retail you don’t get much information and you can't see through the box. They have a specification listing but the only important information there is a listing of the display outputs. I understand that they can't put the clock speeds there because oftentimes the packaging is finalized before that number is. But I would love to see the dimensions included, which is important depending on your case size, and for retail shoppers, you would want to know.
When you open the box up the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend comes wrapped up in its static protective bag inside. There is a layer of foam on top and then a thicker layer of foam which is cut to fit the card to keep it from moving around. Because the card uses PCIe power connections there isn’t a need for a power adapter cable to be included and because it isn’t a huge card there isn’t a support included. You get the card and that’s about it. Ours didn’t have any documentation inside, but I would imagine that retail cards will.
Card Layout and Photos
The ASRock RX 9070 XT Steel Legend is available in both a black model and a white, we received the white model and it is split between a light grey and white for the fan shroud design. The shroud is all plastic and with that, they are able to mold in a lot of intricate designs. The left portion is light grey and at the middle fan the white starts at an angle. There are grey accents on the white as well as at the top and bottom of the fans. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend is 298 mm long, 131mm tall, and 58 mm thick. That puts it just under 3 slots at 2.9 slots which is the normal these days, same with its length and height. I would consider them to be large, but it is in line with all cards. It sits 26mm over the top of the PCI bracket which can be an issue in some cases, but they do have the power connection recess down into the card which means that height isn’t an issue.
The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has a triple fan design with three 90 mm matching fans. Each of the fans has 9 fan blades which have a curve to them. They have a few lines on the blades themselves and then an outer ring that helps give them more strength and also helps direct the airflow down into the heatsink below. They are all also translucent which you don’t see very often, most white cards have matching white fans and black cards have black fans. The translucent plastic used here is paired up with addressable RGB lighting in the center section to light the fans up. Two of the fans have the Steel Legend logo on them and the center fan has the ASRock logo, all three have some white as well to match everything.
The top edge of the card has a few things going on of note. There are two places with branding. At the end of the card on the fan shroud, they have the Radeon logo printed in grey. Then between the first two fans, they have the Steel Legend logo which is backlit with addressable RGB LEDs. That logo has the logo and text with a honeycomb design behind it in grey, it's all inside of a raised section that is attached with two screws. Last up are the power connections. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has two 8-pin PCIe power plugs to power everything and they are sitting at the top of the PCB but that is recessed down into the card 20mm. This means the cooler itself is using space that the plugs would need to take up which is efficient and it also hides the plugs somewhat. They have the connections flipped around backward with the PCB notches for the clips, this means that the heatsink doesn’t need a big space around the plugs for your fingers to get down in there.
Looking at the top and bottom edge of the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend as well as the end of the card we can get a better idea of what ASRock has going on for its cooling. We can see the horizontal aluminum fin heatsink layout and that it is split into two sections. The side closest to the PCI bracket sits over the GPU and in that section, there is a heatplate down at the bottom over the GPU and memory. That spreads the heat out some then the heatpipes are right on top of that. They have the heatpipes loop back around and run through that same section again near the top as well. Then in between the two sections of the cooler, there is a gap where the heatpipes shift up higher and run the length of the larger heatsink section. That heatsink sits over the components on the PCB but does drop down some at the PCB. I am surprised that they didn’t take advantage of that space more and drop all the way down to the PCB level, there is a gap between the cooler and the backplate which could all be more cooling capacity. The heatsink attaches to the PCB and then to the backplate at the end. All of the cooling from the fans blows down into the heatsink and the heatsink pushes it up or down and out the large open areas in the shroud. The end of the card does have an open area as well and we can even see the 7 heatpipe ends. But air doesn’t run in this direction. The end does have a bracket that has three screw holes in it for use with GPU supports.
The back of the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has a full-length metal backplate with a matching white finish. Unlike the the front of the card though the backplate has a whole variety of designs printed on it in two different shades of grey. That includes the Steel Legend logo in the middle and AMD Radeon branding. The support bracket for the GPU is cut around perfectly. They also have three large cutouts on the end for the blow-through section. Up on the top, the backplate extends up to the full height of the card at the end of the card but they do have it notched down where the power plugs in and right next to the power cables for a small switch that turns the lighting on or off.
For display connections, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend has the standard three DisplayPort and one HDMI layout that almost all cards have these days. They all run along the PCB with the HDMI at the bottom of the PCI bracket leaving a lot of room for ventilation above them. ASRock has a whole bunch of slots cut into the bracket but because they are thin there isn’t too much airflow. It isn’t a concern though, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend vents up and down on the cooler, not out this direction.
Before getting into testing I did want to also get a look at the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend’s lighting which they control with Polychrome Sync. All three of the clear fans have addressable RGBs built into the center hub and by default, the lighting does a variety of colors. With the white shroud and the clear fans, the lighting goes a long way and looks great. There are also addressable RGB LEDs behind the Steel Legend branding at the top as well. This has a honeycomb grill set behind it which looks good.
Test Rig and Procedures
Test System
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Live Pricing
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero – Live Pricing
Cooling: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing
Noctua NT-H2 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (2x16GB) 6000MT/s CL28-36-36-96 – Live Pricing
Storage: Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB – Live Pricing
Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing
Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing
Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. With the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend, I am most interested in how it compares to the RX 9070 that I took a look at and of course the competition from Nvidia with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. The Acer RX 5070 was an overclocked model and this is a stock-clocked card, so it will be interesting to see if that ends up putting the two models a lot closer together.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 66762 in the base Fire Strike benchmark which put it over the RTX 4080 but a step behind the two RTX 5070 Ti’s. This was an improvement of 6.7% over the overclocked RX 9070 and 18.3% over the RTX 5070. With Fire Strike Extreme scored 33887, once again between the RTX 4080 SUPER and RTX 5070 Ti. This was 7.9% over the Acer RX 9070 and 18.2% over the RTX 5070. In the Fire Strike Extreme test, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored 17294 and was in between the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 SUPER this time. This was 7.9% over the RX 9070 and 22% over the RTX 5070.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In base Time Spy the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 29217 and is sitting above the RTX 4080 SUPER with the RX 7900 XTX above it. That was 8.3% over the RX 9070 and an impressive 31.4% over the RTX 5070. Then in Time Spy Extreme it scored a 14078 and dropped down below the RTX 4080 SUPER but is sitting ahead of the RTX 4080. That put it 8% over the RX 9070 and 32% over the RTX 5070. It was even 2.6% over the RTX 5070 Ti as well.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 6191 in Speed Way. You can see Nvidia is still doing well here with the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend behind the RTX 4070 Ti but it was still ahead of the 5070 by 6.6% and 5.6% for the RX 9070. For Port Royal, it scored 17816 and is just behind the RTX 4080 and impressively ahead of the RX 7900 XTX. This was 10.7% over the RX 9070 and 26.9% over the RTX 5070.
I also tested using the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 6856 here and is ahead of the RTX 4080 SUPER and with a big gap between it and the 5080 sitting ahead of it. This put it over the RTX 5070 Ti and the RX 7900 XTX. The gap between it and the RX 9070 was 11.4% and 37.2% over the RTX 5070.
I did also run the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend through the 3DMark FSR 2 comparisons. This isn’t the newer FSR 3.1 or the brand new FSR 4, but it does give an example of what kind of performance difference you can see depending on what detail you have your FSR set to. It sits behind the 7900 XTX but more importantly, depending on the detail setting you can see from 80 FPS up to 177 which is a wide range. For comparison, without FSR at all it was running at 42 FPS.
In-Game Benchmarks
Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 8 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of whether turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 is also tested with Super Sampling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). In total, each video card is tested 60 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors, and 240 helps show the performance ideal for the latest higher refresh displays.
So how did the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend do? At 1080p the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend had every result over 60 FPS, all but one over 120 FPS, and 13 out of the 18 were over 240 FPS. At 1440p everything was once again all over 60 FPS, 16 were over 120 FPS, and 6 were over 240 FPS. Then at 4k performance does start to drop but it is still playable with one result under 60 FPS, 7 were between 60-119 FPS, 9 were between 120 and 239 FPS, and there was one over 240 FPS.
To get a better look at some of the cards that are the closest competition to the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend I also have a range of the averaged results across all three resolutions. They are sorted in order by the 1440p result which is important to note because the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend outperformed the RX 7900 XTX at 1080p and 1440p but is 11 FPS behind it at 4k. In the end, it sits behind the RTX 5070 Ti but ahead of the RTX 4080 SUPER from Nvidia and depending on the resolution behind or ahead of the 7900 XTX. There is one thing to note about these results, they do include our Cyberpunk 2077 tests which include a set of tests that include FSR or DLSS at the highest SS setting available. For the 50 Series Nvidia cards that does mean DLSS 4 where AMD currently has FSR 3.1 available but not FSR 4. I hope that we see it included soon to get a better direct comparison. Taking those tests out the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend averaged 248 at 1080p, 203.6 at 1440p, and 119.7 at 4k. The 5070 Ti was still ahead but lower at 264.3 at 1080p, 216.6 at 1440p, and 130.8 at 4k.
Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below.
Another new addition to my testing was a few additional tests using Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of only a few games that support most of the tech from all three of the GPU companies. So I did tests at medium and ultra detail while having Super Sampling on for all of the cards. Using whatever the latest and greatest is supported. In this case, I tested with FSR 3.1. Just a note here, the AMD cards only allowed FSR when running windowed mode whereas Nvidia only performed well in fullscreen mode. This comparison does a great job of showing you the kind of performance increase that you can see in actual games when using FSR, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend went from 60.52 at 4k ultra detail up to 204.39, a 237% increase.
Compute and AI Benchmarks
Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases, people who game also do work on the side. AI performance importance has increased quickly recently as well. So it is also important to check out the compute and AI performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was Geekbench AI, a cross-platform AI benchmark that uses real-world machine learning tasks giving three results, a full precision score, half precision score, and quantized score. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend came in ahead of the RX 7900 XT here which was especially impressive and behind the RTX 4090.
Cooling and Noise
For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I normally take a look at power but in the middle of my testing, I damaged our P-Cat and was getting unreliable performance numbers so I haven’t included that testing for now. I’m hoping to update later once I get that worked out.
With that, my first tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend came in at 42.3 decibels for the 50% fan speed tests which put it up in the top 1/3 of our chart. It dropped down our chart slightly for the 100% fan speed tests but was still above average. The RPM chart does tell us a little about what is going on though, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend is in the top half of the chart for fan speed at 100% at 3484 RPM.
I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend did extremely well and is the second quietest card tested at 34.2 dB. It was also running at just 32% fan speed as well!
To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend came in at 59c which put it down in the bottom portion of our chart. This is especially impressive considering that we already saw ASRocks fan profile wasn’t very aggressive at all and only had the fans running at 32% here. At that time the memory temps were warmer sitting at 88c which is on the other end of the spectrum. Turning the fans up to 100% fan speed and letting the test run the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend dropped down to 46c and the memory temps did drop down some to 74c. 74c is still running surprisingly hot though. It wasn’t a big surprise but 46c was a 13 degree delta between the stock fan profile and 100% fan speed temps showing there is still a lot of cooling performance left in the cooler if you want to use it. That is of course at the expense of noise which we saw this cooler was noisier when you start to get the fan speeds up over 50%.
While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend ranges from 40.1c to 33.3c on the fan side for temperatures. The blow-through end is of course the coolest but 6c between it and the fan next to it isn’t bad. The top edge has the most heat on the exposed PCB around the power connection, our power cable was also extremely hot here as well especially with the air being pushed up around it. The heatsink itself on the top ranged from 40.6c up to 51.7c with the cooler area being over the blow-through section. Then on the back, the exposed PCB behind the GPU is the hottest area but the metal backplate itself is doing a good job pulling some heat out and acting as a basic heatsink rather than trapping that heat sink. The backplate behind the PCB is in the 53-54c range and then down at the blow-through area, it is much cooler at 34.5c.
Overall and Final Verdict
With our testing done and out of the way we can step back and look at the overall package that AMD and ASRock have put together with the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend and the RX 9070 XT in general. AMDs Radeon RX 9070 XT is impressive, especially when we are looking at raster performance. Having already tested the RX 9070 that isn’t too much of a surprise. But I was surprised with our in-game tests where at 1440p it averaged a higher FPS across all of the games than the 7900 XTX in the same test. Of course at 4k the 7900 XTX jumped back ahead handedly. The 9070 XT held its own against Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti and completely left the RTX 5070 in the dust. It is capable at 1440p and can handle 4k gaming as well although if you expect to be able to play anything at 4k at high refresh rate performance levels you aren’t going to see that with every game. Nvidia is still ahead when it comes to ray tracing and AI frame rendering but AMD has made good improvements there and having 16GB of VRAM helps as well.
As for the Steel Legend itself, the card is available in both black and white models. The white model I tested is a little more aggressive on the styling than I would normally like in my PC but the all-white shroud helps some of that blend in and looks great. It has translucent fans and RGB lighting inside of each of them which gives a lot of lighting. If RGB lighting is your thing, this is a lot better than just having a logo backlit, but it does have that as well. If you don’t like the lighting you do get a kill switch right on the card, no need to run software to turn it off. The cooler is a little bi-polar. It was extremely quiet in our noise tests when under load. That is because its cooling performance is impressive and ASRock was able to run the fans under load at just 32%. The fans do get noisy once you get into the 50% and higher range though. But if you want it to run cooler or want to overclock there is a lot of headroom in the cooler as long as noise isn’t an issue for you. The memory temperatures on the other hand ran hot in my testing no matter how fast the fans were running.
Overall AMDs Radeon RX 9070 XT is a great GPU and ASRock did a good job on the Steel Legend, especially keeping in mind that it is technically an MSRP-focused card. It makes me wonder what they have done with their overclocked cards. The MSRP for this card and the 9070 XT in general is $599 and at that price, you are getting a great value. Of course getting cards at that price, or at all is an issue. There has been post-launch controversy about pricing which isn’t helped with tariffs as well. The lowest-priced 9070 XT listed on PC Part Picker right now is $939.99 with a few RTX 5070 Ti’s being available lower than that complicate things. I wish we could have a launch without stock and or pricing issues. In the end, it will depend on what you can find and the prices you get. If you are in the market and come across the ASRock RX 9070 XT Steel Legend at MSRP you can’t go wrong though!
Live Pricing: HERE
