Introduction

The ASRock Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB Steel Legend OC is the company's premium custom design rendition of AMD's new performance segment graphics card, here to take the fight to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060-series. The ASRock Steel Legend comes with a serious triple-slot cooling solution with high-end aesthetic touches such as RGB lighting, a mostly white trim, and the company's highest factory overclock for the RX 9060 XT. With this generation, AMD is looking to win through significant generational performance uplifts at its given price-points, and the RX 9060 XT is designed to offer an interesting value proposition. Its 8 GB variant starts at $300, or the same price as the RTX 5060, and the 16 GB variant we're reviewing today starts at $350, undercutting even the 8 GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti. The card is designed for maxed out gameplay at 1080p, including with ray tracing.



The Radeon RX 9060 XT is powered by the new AMD RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which promises some of the company's biggest generational performance uplifts per CU thanks not just to the generational IPC increases of its shader units, but several improvements to the way they handle parallelism. AMD also worked hard on improving the memory management at the level of its shader engines, letting it hold onto older (and cheaper) GDDR6 memory. While the memory bandwidth increase over the RX 7000-series is modest, the memory management enhancements are akin to a generational upgrade in memory performance.

The main story with RDNA 4, however, is the advances AMD made with ray tracing performance, with the company claiming a 2X uplift in ray intersection performance over the previous RDNA 3 architecture. Having tested the RX 9070-series, we know that these claims mostly hold true. Ray tracing is no longer a novelty, and AAA titles of today are expected to implement it in some form. What's also become ubiquitous is performance enhancements such as DLSS and FSR, and here AMD announced its biggest upgrade enabled by the company's significant generational uplift in AI acceleration performance with RDNA 4. The new FSR 4 super resolution feature by AMD replaces the shader-based upscaler with a new AI ML model that's more accurate, and significantly uplifts image quality at every performance tier. AMD is planning even more ML-based features for FSR, under the "Project Redstone" codename, which we've detailed in this review.

The RX 9060 XT debuts AMD's second silicon from the RDNA 4 generation, the Navi 44. Built on the 4 nm TSMC N4P foundry node, this chip is on paper half the silicon as the Navi 48 powering the RX 9070 series. It comes with 32 compute units, which make 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 RT accelerators, and 128 TMUs. The chip also has 64 ROPs. The memory sub-system is a minor update over the previous generation—16 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 across a 128-bit wide memory interface, which makes for 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The ASRock Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB Steel Legend OC comes with a heavy aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by three premium axial airflow fans. You get RGB LED illumination on the fans, and along the top of the card. ASRock offers factory overclocked speeds of 2780 MHz Game clock compared to 2530 MHz of AMD reference cards. ASRock is pricing the card at $390.