Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 9070 Steel Legend OC is a custom design by the company for AMD's second-fastest GPU from the new Radeon RX 9000 series. The Steel Legend brand of graphics cards and motherboards from ASRock target gamers and power users, and are positioned a notch below the company's Phantom Gaming series. These products tend to come with an industrial design with a brushed metal or white-themed appearance. The RX 9070 Steel Legend should visually match the latest line of Steel Legend motherboards based on Intel and AMD 800-series chipset motherboards; and should also look perfectly fine in any white-themed build. The Radeon RX 9070 is a value-ended performance segment offering by AMD, designed for maxed out gameplay at 1440p, including ray tracing.



The Radeon RX 9070 is positioned below the current-gen flagship RX 9070 XT, and is cut from the same silicon powering it. Both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are based on the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon; and while the RX 9070 XT maxes this chip out, the RX 9070 gets 56 out of 64 compute units present on the chip. This works out to 3,584 stream processors, 112 AI accelerators, 56 RT accelerators, 224 TMUs, and an unchanged 128 ROP count. The memory sub-system is common between the two, the RX 9070 gives you 16 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus for 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It also has an unchanged 64 MB of Infinity Cache. AMD opted for the older GDDR6 standard, which is made up for with the RX 9070 series getting 256-bit wide memory interfaces, 16 GB memory sizes, and several architecture-level memory management improvements.

The AMD Radeon RX 9000 series is powered by the latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which comes with a design focus on maximizing performance per compute unit. Unlike the previous generation high-end chips, the Navi 48 is a monolithic silicon built entirely on the 4 nm process, which helps significantly improve transistor density and reduce die size. Besides a significant improvement in shader performance, letting AMD achieve its market positioning with no more than 64 CU, AMD claims a 100% increase in ray tracing performance over the previous RDNA 3 generation, reducing the cost of having ray tracing enabled in today's AAA games, given that the feature is no longer a novelty. AMD also significantly improved the AI acceleration performance of its GPU, letting the company implement FSR 4. The new FSR 4 is the first attempt from AMD to implement AI model based super resolution, with its crucial task of attempting to reconstruct details. This claims to offer a significant improvement in image quality at any given preset compared to FSR 3. The new FSR 4 suite is exclusive to the Radeon RX 9000 series due to tensor core equivalent hardware not being present in older generations.

ASRock Radeon RX 9070 Steel Legend is a large custom design that looks like it's from a segment above when installed in your rig. It comes with a triple-slot cooling solution that features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by a trio of large 90 mm fans that come with webbed impellers for maximum axial airflow. The cooler shroud and backplate are white, and there's a generous amount of RGB LED bling in the form of illumination for the three fans, with a large Steel Legend logo on top of the card. The card even puts out a 3-pin ARGB header so you can sync your build's lighting with that of the card; as well as a manual LED cutoff switch. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. ASRock offers factory overclocked speeds of 2210 MHz Game clock compared to 2070 MHz reference Game clock. In the USA, the card is listed for $670, but sold out. In-stock, Amazon wants $940. Prices in Europe are more reasonable. Here the card is in stock at many reputable stores, at a price of €675, including 20% VAT, which converts to $635 without tax.