As CES 2025 nears, much of the buzz and leaks surrounding PC hardware center around the GPU market where both major market players AMD and Nvidia are expected to showcase their flagship next-generation offerings on the 6th of January.
This happens in the backdrop of Intel’s considerable success with the Arc Battlemage B580 and B570 GPU which are reportedly sold out at multiple retailers thanks to them representing a mix of excellent value for money and performance that pits them against Nvidia and AMD’s mid-range GPUs even as Intel offers them in 12GB and 10GB VRAM flavors respectively.
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AMD’s Rumored Radeon RX 9070XT GPU To Come With FSR4 Upgrades In Tow
AMD’s newest RDNA4 GPU might have an edge when it launches this January.
Why The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT Is Expected To Be Different
AMD’s Radeon 7000 series saw it make a marked shift in terms of strategy, scrapping its BFGPU competitor to the RTX 4090 with the company citing limited demand with its ultimate and penultimate offerings, the RX 7900XTX and RX 7900XT being closer to Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti GPUs respectively.
With competition heating up from Intel in the entry-level and mid-range segment and AMD struggling in terms of GPU sales versus Nvidia thanks to the latter cornering the market with the RTX 4000 series and then following suit with its SUPER lineup, the RX 9070XT is expected to concentrate on the lower rung of the enthusiast tier market instead.
Rumors point to AMD’s latest unannounced GPU to be based on the Navi 48 GPU core with a total of 64 CUs (Compute Units) paired to 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus. It is expected to come with a TBP (total board power) rating of 260W for the reference design as per current leaks.
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What Do The Leaks Tell Us About The RX 9070XT?
While much of the leaks around the RX 9070XT have centered around its underlying chip architecture, memory configuration, and release date, the current leaks from user ‘zhangzhonghao’ on the Chinese forum Chiphell provide considerably more relevant context.
The leaker states that while the TBP of the official or stock version of the 9070XT is rated at 260W, 3rd party SKU or AIB models have pushed as much as 330W. They also stated that it is within 5% of the performance a current RTX 4080 offers, albeit for the stock unit.
The added TBP might indicate that the RX 9070XT offers significantly more overclocking headroom than most modern GPUs do with AIBs essentially leveraging it as indicated by the 330W rating. It also serves to confirm that while AMD’s upcoming RDNA4 GPU is expected to cater more to the mid-range segment, it is expected to be competent versus current-generation GPUs like Nvidia’s penultimate RTX 4080.
Other leaks also provided information about the purported clock speed of the new GPU which is expected to sit at 2.8GHz while boost clocks are expected to push past the 3GHz mark. There is, however, sadly no information regarding pricing for the GPU even as it is expected to be announced shortly thanks to AMD being tight-lipped ahead of its CES debut.
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AMD Rumored To Release As Many As Three Different Ryzen 9000 Series Desktop CPUs In January
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