ASRock Radeon RX 9060 XT Steel Legend OC
May, 2025Type
Graphics CardPrice
$389.99 USConclusion - A Win For Mainstream Gamers!
The battle in the sub-$400 US market has been a brutal one for all major GPU vendors. Last-gen, AMD and NVIDIA offered some underwhelming solutions, such as the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 GPUs, and Alchemist from Intel struggled due to lackluster driver support. However, Intel was the first to enter the next-gen GPU space with its Battlemage B580 and B570, both offering great value & more than 8 GB VRAM, plus with the backing of much finer software. It was up to AMD and NVIDIA to up their game from there, but NVIDIA 5060 series stumbled with their disappointing gen-on-gen gains and the emphasis on DLSS 4 (MFG), which was the only feature that made these cards stand out. It is now AMD's turn with the 9060 series, and today, we finally get to talk about the 16 GB variant of the 9060 XT.
The Red Team Brings Back Sensible Price/Perf Positioning In the Sub $400 US Segment
AMD has, without a doubt, managed to tick one box that they were highlighting ever since the introduction of RDNA 4, to bring back the price/perf war against its rivals. The RX 9060 XT with its $349 US price and 16 GB VRAM cements that claim and offers great performance, which is either on par with the 5060 Ti 16 GB, a graphics card that retails for $80 US more and also manages to beat it in a couple of titles that we had tested.
The Radeon RX 9070 series already delivers strong value against the RTX 5070 series, but the $300-$400 US segment is crucial for both NVIDIA and AMD, and it is AMD that is leading this segment now, with the performance we managed to see in our benchmarks throughout our testing. In the titles where the 5060 Ti wins, it is only by a marginal 5-10 FPS, and with the abundant 16 GB VRAM that the 9060 XT has to its disposal, you can get a very playable experience at 1440p and an even better experience at 1080p if you are running high-refresh rate monitors.
Another area which surprised us is ray tracing performance, where the 9060 XT and 5060 Ti were neck-on-neck. There were a few titles with Path Tracing where the RTX 50 series excelled over the RDNA 4 offerings but in standard ray traced titles, the Red Team has seen major improvements & that works in their favor as future games are relying heavily on the technology.
FSR 4 May Not Have MFG, But It Looks Just As Good As DLSS 4 Now
FSR 4 is entering its refinement stage now. While DLSS 4 has better support in number of titles, and also has games out there that support various next-gen technologies such as Neural Radiance Cache, MFG, and Ray Reconstruction, AMD is getting there and with FSR 4 Redstone landing later this year, the company is going to offer even better image quality and frame-generation support to gamers that are part of its ecosystem.
The only major drawback is that AMD still feels like it's catching up to DLSS 4, as the innovations coming in FSR 4 redstone are already being implemented by NVIDIA partnered developers who leverage DLSS 4. So, while AMD has 60+ FSR 4 titles this month, NVIDIA has many more, and the numbers are in favor of NVIDIA. The company is also looking to further enhance DLSS 4 in the coming months so it won't be that simple to tackle NVIDIA in the AI realm unless AMD really starts thinking out of the box and becomes the first to introduce a major game-changing technology for its FiedlityFX suite that makes gamers switch from the Green Team.
Things we liked about the ASRock Radeon RX 9060 XT Steel Legend OC 16 GB:
- Faster than the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB in many titles
- Great Perf/$ if available at MSRP
- FSR 4 + Redstone support is great
- Ray Tracing performance is now competitive
- 16 GB VRAM is sufficient for 1440p gaming
- Low noise output with 0 dB operation
- Factory overclocked out of the box
- DP2.1a & HDMI 2.1 support
- PCIe Express 5.0 technology
AMD's partners are also putting out some great designs, such as the Steel Legend OC from ASRock, which offers a massive, almost +200 MHz, overclock out of the box, along with a triple-fan cooling solution that looks and works brilliantly. The card also features a standard 8-pin connector, making sure that mainstream gamers don't have to worry about all the ATX/PCIe standards that are a pain to get to know when running 16-pin connectors.
Things that can improve:
- 16 GB model at $299 US instead of 8 GB would have been awesome
- Lower power rating
- GDDR6 memory runs hot
- Premium vs MSRP (+$ 40 US)
- FSR 4 doesn't offer MFG support
- FSR 4 Redstone support is still months away
The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB graphics card around $350-$380 US, is an excellent choice for mainstream PC gamers. You get great performance for 1080p/1440p gaming, FSR 4 support that lands you good image quality in frame-generation and upscaling modes, faster ray tracing that is on par with NVIDIA's Blackwell offering, and supports all the latest features in terms of media and video playback. While we haven't tested the 8 GB model and while AMD believes some gamers might want to go with a lower-priced and lower-VRAM solution, we think it's time that higher VRAM solutions become the standard. Intel has already paved the way with its 10 GB B570 & 12 GB B580, which retail for under $300 US. In fact, if Intel ever comes out with a 16 GB Battlemage with a GPU bigger than its current die, then that has the potential to further shake things up in this segment. But in the meantime, the RX 9060 XT is an easy recommendation to those who don't see that big of a benefit from NVIDIA's DLSS 4 features, which are definitely enticing, but in terms of value, the Red Team wins this one with its 16 GB 9060 XT.
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