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
