Powercolor Radeon RX 9060 XT Review: More Than Just Entry-Level RDNA4

While details of AMD’s entry-level Radeon RX 9060 XT has been out for some time now, it’s only now that we are able to share our review about the “entry-level” RDNA4 graphics card. In this review, we were provided a unit made by the Chinese brand Powercolor, and honestly, it is a card that surprised me in more ways than one.

Specifications

Design

Specifically, the 9060 XT that I have in my lab is the Powercolor Reaper and I gotta say, it’s a lot smaller than I would imagine a card of this calibre would be. By that, I mean that it is tiny and yet, the brand still managed to slap a dual-fan cooling solution on to it. For another matter, the card also uses PTM7950 phase-change thermal pads, something that we first saw being used in laptops by ASUS and MSI with their laptops.

Adding on to the allure, the Reaper 9060 XT also comes with a powdered metal-like backplate, although it feels a little excessive, since I doubt that a card this size is going to suffer from any sagging issues inside the casing. Unfortunately, you only get two DisplayPort 1.4 ports and one HDMI 2.1 ports. That’s one DisplayPort short of the typical four outputs that most GPUs come with anyway.

Specs-wise, we have the 16GB version of the 9060 XT, and this model stands out for being clocked to run beyond the 3GHz mark out of the box. Specifically, 3,230MHz, which 100MHz over the reference version of the card.

Testbench

The testbench remains unchanged from the times I reviewed other GPUs, including the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Series, RTX 5060 Ti, and the Radeon RX 9070 XT.

For comparison, I will be benching the 9060 XT against the RTX 5060 Ti, the RTX 5070, and the RTX 4060 Ti. Do note that the majority of titles I’ve chosen to test the card with support ray tracing, upscaling, and frame generation, the latter two through their respective DLSS and FSR technologies.

On that note, I test the GPUs running games at their highest available preset, and on whatever it is physically capable of supporting. As such, the performance metrics reflected here are those of the 9060 XT running at full speed, to put it simply. And boy

Benchmarks, Temperature, And Power Consumption

Alright, so, let’s get one thing out of the way. Until a time the good folks at CDPR make FSR4 a native feature in Cyberpunk 2077 – hopefully, with FSR4 Redstone – running the game’s path tracing feature is going to render the game near unplayable on cards like the 9060 XT and at resolutions above FHD. Drop it down to just ray tracing, even at the Psycho settings, and that performance gap closes in significantly, and that includes at 4K resolution.

That brings me to the 9060 XT’s overall performance, even at 4K. Doom The Dark Ages, a game that recently launched, and has ray tracing baked into it by default, ran at average frames of 86 fps, and yes, that was with FSR and Frame Generation on. Granted, the card had some weird stuttering issues pop up on occasion but for the most part, it was pretty smooth sailing. On resolutions lower than 4K, the average frames jumped and stayed well above the 120 fps mark.

This was a pattern that replicated itself even on Monster Hunter Wilds, whereby the average FPS with ray tracing and Frame Generation on yielded an average of 80 fps at 4K, and more than 120 fps on both 1440p and FHD.

The trade-off, if you can even call it that, is that while the card peaks at 68°C when on a full load, the idling temperature sits between 32°C and 38°C, even with the ambient temperature of my lab kept at a constant 20°C. My best guess is that the card does so because it’s constantly pulling 35W off the wall, even when idling.

Conclusion

For a card that retails for US$349 (~RM1,489), the results garnered from my review of the Radeon RX 9060 XT are certainly surprising. Whatever magic AMD is running through its engineering department, I can only hope that the company has enough to keep the momentum going, especially if rumours of it creating an enthusiast-class 9080 XT actually rings true.

To condense this entire review down to a single question and answer: Does this entry-level RDNA4 GPU slap? Yes, it does. Even more precisely, it slaps hard for a sub-RM2,000 GPU.

Photography by John Law.