Radeon RX 9070 XT – Sapphire, ASUS and XFX Review
XFX RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Up Close
XFX RX 9070 XT Mercury OC Up Close
There are three different tiers in the XFX range. Mercury at the top. Quick Silver in the middle. Swift at the bottom. The RX 9070 XT falls into their premium Mercury category. Available in both black and white, we’ve got the white model in for review.
As a premium model the XFX Mercury benefits from their Maglev fans. With magnets strong enough to lift a kilogram, and an 70000 hour warranty, there is plenty of lifespan built into the design. We love that XFX will send you a replacement if one dies without requiring you to send the old one back. More companies need to adopt this level of trust.
Around the back we don’t have anything as innovative as we saw on the Sapphire, but XFX are still giving us huge cutouts for both the power and airflow elements. It’s strange that they’ve not branded the backplate like so many companies do. We’d have preferred them to leave it plain white in that case, freeing us up to get our art on.
Certainly the XFX RX 9070 XT Mercury is a thick card. No surprise from the company that brought us the THICC cards we guess. This view is probably the one where we prefer the black card over the white one.
Power and Cooling
AMD are sticking to the tried and true PCIe power connectors we’ve all got. It makes a lot of sense. Why risk a technology that hasn’t quite had all the bugs squished yet? Okay this isn’t a sleek solution, but it’s a worry free one. As fans of robust engineering, we don’t mind the non-compact option.
We said that the fans were magnetic and here they are. It’s never been easier to drop them in and out. No disassembly required. If your rigs are on as much as ours then those high hours counts are tested more often than manufacturers might expect. The XFX solution ensures that when the day comes, you don’t need to find your toolkit out to replace it.
Lastly connectivity is the now-standard setup of HDMI and mainly DisplayPorts. We don’t know who officially said “no, one HDMI and three DisplayPorts” but we’re always curious as to why it isn’t two and two.
