Overclocked RX 9070XT Tops RTX5080

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards have officially hit the market, and despite inventory levels exceeding those of the RTX 50 series, they remain in short supply due to high demand.

This week, overclocking experts Der8auer and Alva Jonathan showcased the overclocking potential of these cards on YouTube. Their testing revealed that the RX 9070 XT, when properly undervolted, actually outperforms NVIDIA's RTX 5080 in real-world gaming scenarios.

Both overclocking masters achieved approximately 10% framerate improvements in Cyberpunk 2077 by simply adjusting the GPU power limit and voltage curve through software tweaks, without manually adjusting GPU frequency offsets.

The two testers used different platforms, so the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 data in their tests shouldn't be directly compared. However, Der8auer tested both the RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT in the same test environment, making those results directly comparable.

Der8auer selected the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil for his testing, a high-end model with factory overclocking. Further manual core overclocking didn't yield performance improvements, suggesting the card was already pushed to certain limits at the factory. Interestingly, while memory overclocking did increase frequency, it actually reduced in-game performance due to error correction mechanisms sacrificing performance to fix bugs – ultimately proving counterproductive.

Ultimately, Der8auer achieved a 3.36GHz clock speed on the RX 9070 XT by increasing the GPU power limit to 110% and applying a -170mV voltage offset, resulting in a 10% framerate boost compared to another XFX card.

Worth noting is that AMD Radeon software's undervolting mechanism doesn't simply reduce voltage – it adjusts the entire voltage-frequency curve to achieve higher frequencies at lower voltages, similar to how a car's transmission shifting logic works.

The other overclocking expert, Alva Jonathan, tested an ASRock RX 9070, which is also a factory-overclocked model.

Similar to Der8auer's findings, manual core frequency overclocking yielded minimal results. Jonathan achieved comparable framerate improvements through undervolting and power adjustments. He also demonstrated how reducing the card's power consumption could extend its lifespan, offering gamers a new approach to hardware maintenance.