Cool and quiet: How GIGABYTE’s RX 9070 series cards use premium cooling to push performance

The RX 9000 series is here and if you’ve even glanced at news headlines lately, it’s made a major splash. Alongside impressive performance, the RX 9070 and 9070 XT have captured the gaming zeitgeist and are seen as two GPUs that are not only worth buying, but are actually available at fair prices. And GIGABYTE’s options are right there for the taking.

Looking to differentiate its offerings from the competition, though, GIGABYTE has enhanced the cooling potential of these cards to no end. The GIGABYTE RX 9070 XT GAMING OC comes with a Windforce cooling system, featuring a triple fan configuration with specialized fan blades for enhanced airflow and air-pressure. There’s even a graphene nano lubricant in there–that sounds super buzzwordy, but the bottom line is these fans work fast and quiet.

There’s a giant vapor chamber on the GPU, too, and with conductive gel over all the memory chips and VRMs, there’s not a spot on this card that should be overheating. Indeed, with the low running temperatures this card ships out with a 90MHz increase on its boost clock, and an extra 120MHz on its game clock. I bet you could push it further too with a little manual overclocking. We’ve already seen some XT models break 3.3GHz–see what you can do.

GIGABYTE

Whichever GIGABYTE RX 9070 series card you pick, you’ll get the full benefit of AMD’s new RDNA4 architecture. That brings enhanced ray tracing support from a new generation of ray accelerators, as well as support for FSR4 with frame generation. In compatible games, that can enhance visuals and frame rates to new heights, making games look and feel faster and smoother than ever before.

The non-XT version of the RX 9070 is more affordable, but has the same metal backplate and impressive fan configuration. Clocks are much higher than stock, too: 2520MHz boost, and up to 2210MHz in games. That’s close to a 200MHz uplift before you even do any overclocking yourself.

If you want a fancier-looking RX 9070 XT, take a look at the AORUS ELITE version. It goes faster still than the GAMING OC model and introduces additional heatpipes for even-more advanced cooling, as well as an RGB metallic backplate. That’s backed up by an RGB halo design on the front, so if you’re using a riser cable to mount your graphics card where everyone can see it, this card will happily take centre stage.

GIGABYTE

All three cards come with dual-BIOS switches for added redundancy in the case of a BIOS flash, and to give you options for how your card runs. They also use standard 8-pin power connectors and even include indicator lights to let you know if any of the cables are misaligned or overheating, giving you complete peace of mind.