Sapphire Pure AMD Radeon RX 9070: Better than RTX 5070, but…

Introduction and parameters

AMD set the price of the more affordable Radeon RX 9070 as a direct competitor to GeForce RTX 5070. Compared to Nvidia’s card, it offers better raw performance and 16 GB of memory instead of 12 GB. For dedicated gamers, AMD’s Radeon is the more attractive option. However, there’s one compelling reason to avoid the RX 9070 from AMD—the slightly more expensive but significantly more powerful Radeon RX 9070 XT.

We recently introduced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 in detail in articles dedicated to the RDNA4 architecture, the specifications of both models, their features, and the new technologies they bring.

 

So, let’s quickly recap the reference parameters and move on to the overclocked Radeon RX 9070 from Sapphire’s Pure series.

 


The card comes with a factory-overclocked GPU. The typical game clock is increased to 2210 MHz, but the bigger factor is likely the raised power limit for the card, which has been increased from the reference 220 W to 245 W. As a result, the operating clock speeds are significantly higher, and you can find detailed clock speed behavior in the sections on operating characteristics. The power limit can be adjusted in the overclocking panel in Radeon Software, ranging from -30% to +10%.

 

To the values from GPU-Z monitoring, I’ll add data from HWiNFO, which provides plenty of details. This includes hotspot readings, which are missing on GeForce cards. The power limit can be increased by ten percent.


 


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