New leak claims AMD's upcoming RX 9070 XT GPU hits over 3.2 GHz and could be an overclocking beast

AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs are officially imminent. We've had plenty of leaks, including some eye-popping performance claims. If that wasn't exciting enough, now there's news of healthy overclocking headroom for the new GPUs.

Various earlier reports put the 9070 XT's boost clock at 3.1 GHz. But this new leak says the GPU will clock at 2.97 GHz as standard. However, X user and regular hardware leaker Tomasz Gawroński (via NotebookCheck) claims the GPU can hit 3.244 GHz. Even more impressive, that was achieved at 329 W, just 25 W over stock settings, and running at a relatively relaxed 50 degrees C.

Those power and temp numbers suggest this was a fairly mild overclock and that the GPU will be able to hit higher clockspeeds still. That scans doubly when, for instance, you consider that AMD's current Radeon RX 7900 XT officially boosts to 2.5 GHz, but the quickest 9700 XT registered on HWBot's overclocking index achieved 3.23 GHz.

All this makes for an interesting comparison with Nvidia's new RTX 50 GPUs. Dave managed to squeeze fully 500 MHz out of the RTX 5080 FE card, which brought a very healthy 10% performance boost. That immediately had us wishing Nvidia had shipped the 5080 with those higher clocks and put more space between it and last-gen RTX 4080 and 4080 Super graphics cards.

It's perhaps not surprising that we also saw similar results in our RTX 5070 Ti review, what with it using the same GB203 GPU and hitting fairly epic 3.2 GHz. Of course, for now we don't know how well the AMD RX 9070 XT will perform at stock clocks, let alone overclocked. But it certainly does seem like overclocking is at least a defining feature of this generation of GPUs.

Actually, it might turn out to be its saviour. Certainly, Nvidia's new RTX 50 family has been largely disappointing, save perhaps for the RTX 5090 which comes at a hefty price but does at least move the game on tangibly from the RTX 4090.

The RTX 5080 and 5070 Ti have proven much more incremental. So, the ample overclocking headroom goes a little way to making up for that.

Taking a step back, it does all make sense. Both the RTX 50 family and upcoming RX 9070 GPUs essentially carried over the same TSMC silicon node. Both are on TSMC N4, which is closely related to N5.

In other words, both are on a very mature node, which is always a good thing for enabling maximum clockspeeds. Moreover, high clocks seem to be one of the core enablers for the 9070 XT's mooted impressive performance. In terms of shader count, it's not a particularly large and complex chip, with an expected 4,096 shaders.

That compares with 6,144 from the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, 5,376 for the 7900 XT and 3,840 from the 7800 XT. That last figure is just 6.5% lower than the mooted 9070 XT. However, the 7800 XT only boosts to 2.43 GHz as standard. So, the 9070 XT's rumoured standard clockspeeds add a further 22%.

Then factor in architectural improvements, including what's expected to be a big boost in ray-tracing performance, plus some overclocking and, well, you could have something very exciting. Well, you could if AMD prices it right, which is a whole different story, and one that we've largely covered off over here.