Question 9070 XT vs 9070

[IJIN]

I am trying to decide between these two. I know that XT is "better" especially since prices are somewhat close (local 100euro difference).

However. I play 1440p, not planning 4K. What is important to me is not only the performance, but also thermals (I live in a hot country), loudness and power consumption. I would like a "lean and efficient" card. If XT only gives me 10% more FPS but uses 50% more electricity and is much louder then it's not really worth it for me.

My question is what real difference of power consumption, temperature and loudness between these two cards? I know this data is available online, but I'm too stupid to really make sense of it. Could someone compare them to me like to a 5-year-old. Thank you.

 

[Lutfij]

I'd get the XT, be able to run current games on higher details. As you go down the road with the GPU, you'll be reducing the details to maintain a playable level, the XT should keep you afloat for a little longer.

If you're worried about thermals, you can always undervolt.

 

[Eximo]

Using the reference numbers.
220W vs 304W
3584 CUs vs 4096 CUs
2520Mhz vs 2970Mhz

Simple math puts the 9070 at 25% slower for 72% the power. This is not a good way to do it, and really only works with hardware that is extremely similar, in this case the exact same GPU die.

In practice that actually comes closers to 10% difference in real world performance with the same power savings. More about the architecture and pipeline than it is the total core count and frequency, and they have the same bandwidth and memory.

Every individual card will be a little different and the stock clocks will be subject to ambient temperature, your chassis cooling, and the boost algorithms in the card's BIOS. So the base reference numbers mean a lot less than they should.

You can also do the opposite of undervolting, which the RX 9070 is basically already doing. Some RX 9070 XT BIOS will directly load onto RX 9070 cards and allow you to access the 300W power limit of the larger card. This has shown to bring the RX 9070 really quite close in performance because the higher power budget with lesser core count allows for higher frequencies. Clearly something AMD did not want their partners to mess with.

RX 9070 is on par with the highest efficiency cards out there. Only beaten by a few very light cards.

 

[Teknoman2]

If you look up an undervolting guide and do some testing, you can lower the power consumption of the XT by a lot while keeping the performance.