XFX Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB Review: Affordable Power with Modern Features
Editor’s Note: This is a joint review with Mario and Mark, a very special thanks to Mark Poppin, and charts by M.M.
The midrange GPU market is a battlefield again, and AMD has returned with the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, a card designed to dominate the 1080p landscape and provide surprising strength at 1440p, especially with the help of the newly matured FSR 4. Our test unit, the XFX Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, represents AMD’s push to deliver more VRAM, better ray tracing, and a modern feature set at a reasonable price. In a market cluttered with 8GB GPUs pushing $400, this $349 contender is a breath of fresh air.
A Modern Architecture for the Masses
The RX 9060 XT is based on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, built on TSMC’s N4P process. It comes equipped with 32 compute units, 32 ray accelerators, and 64 AI accelerators. Clock speeds boost up to 3130 MHz, with 2048 stream processors and 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus. The 20 Gbps memory speed translates to 320 GB/s of bandwidth, a step down from NVIDIA’s GDDR7 cards but more than enough for 1080p and 1440p workloads.
| SPECIFICATIONS (Reference Models) | AMD RADEON RX 9060 XT 166B ($349) | AMD RADEON RX 9060 XT 86B ($299) | AMD RADEON RX 7600 XT 166B ($329) | Nvidia Geforce RTX 5060 Tl 86B ($379) |
| DESIGN | ||||
| Process Node | TSMC N4P | TSMC N4P | TSMC N6 | TSMC 4N |
| MEMORY | ||||
| Memory Size & Speed | 16GB / 20 Gbps | 8GB / 20 Gbps | 16GB / 18 Gbps | 8GB / 28 Gbps |
| GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR7 | |
| Memory Bus | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Effective Memory Bandwidth | 320 GB/s | 320 GB/s | 288 GBß | 448 GB/s |
| VIDEO | ||||
| H.264 | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode |
| HEVC | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode |
| AVI | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode | Encode/Decode |
| CONNECTIVITY | ||||
| HDMI@ | HDMI@ 2.1b | HDMI@ 2.1b | HDMI@ 2.1 | HDMI@ 2.1b |
| DisplayPort | DisplayPort2.1*a UHBR13.5 | DisplayPort2.1 *a UHBR13.5 | DisplayPort2.1 UHBRIO | DisplayPort2.1b UHBR20 |
| PCI-Express | 5.0 x16 | 5.0 x16 | 4.0 x8 | 5.0 x8 |
| Board Power | 160W | 150W | 190W | 180W |
| Recommended Power Supply Wattage | 450W | 450W | 600w | 600W |
XFX’s implementation is as polished as ever. Their cooler runs cool and, more importantly, nearly silent. This is a card you can run in a compact build or open-air case without adding noise pollution to your workspace.
Lets take a deeper look at the card itself and our Benchmarking setup.