Wednesday, January 8th 2025
ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT Comes with Three 8-pin Power Connectors
At the 2025 International CES, ASUS showed off its Radeon RX 9070 XT TUF Gaming graphics card. This card was part of a multi-brand showcase AMD set up in its booth. The card features the latest generation of TUF Gaming board design that the company is debuting with the GeForce RTX 50-series and Radeon RX 90-series. The card features a triple slot cooling solution, with its Axial-Tech fans taking up an entire slot (thicker fans mean lower RPM). The PCB is 2/3 the length of the card, so all airflow from the third fan is vented through the heatsink and out a large cutout on the backplate.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT is its power connectors. The card calls for three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We've only seen one other custom RX 9070 XT come with three connectors, and that is the XFX RX 9070 XT Merc 319 Black. The question then arises, what is a small performance-segment GPU going to do with 525 W of power on tap? Most other cards, including the PowerColor Red Devil, come with just two 8-pin connectors (375 W), so does the presence of three connectors mean that the board power of overclocked RX 7090 XT exceed 300 W, and board partners are trying to reduce the load on the 75 W put out by the PCIe slot, by sneaking in a third 8-pin input? This isn't the only oddball power connector configuration we've seen at CES for the RX 9070 series. The ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi comes with a 16-pin 12V2x6 power connector, although there's no way of telling yet if this is configured for 600 W—it could even be keyed for 300 W.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT is its power connectors. The card calls for three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We've only seen one other custom RX 9070 XT come with three connectors, and that is the XFX RX 9070 XT Merc 319 Black. The question then arises, what is a small performance-segment GPU going to do with 525 W of power on tap? Most other cards, including the PowerColor Red Devil, come with just two 8-pin connectors (375 W), so does the presence of three connectors mean that the board power of overclocked RX 7090 XT exceed 300 W, and board partners are trying to reduce the load on the 75 W put out by the PCIe slot, by sneaking in a third 8-pin input? This isn't the only oddball power connector configuration we've seen at CES for the RX 9070 series. The ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi comes with a 16-pin 12V2x6 power connector, although there's no way of telling yet if this is configured for 600 W—it could even be keyed for 300 W.
77 Comments on ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT Comes with Three 8-pin Power Connectors
FG always requires the use of latency reducing option to be enabled such as Reflex and now Reflex 2.
Without this enabled you get 240fps but it doesn't feel like 240 because of the input delay. Show me a card in the last ten years that did +1Ghz OC on air. I think the closest might have been 980 Ti in 2014 as it OC'ed well but even that was not able to do a single Ghz on top of it's boost clocks. At least not on air or without hardmods. "Vocal minority" are people like you asking for 16pin. Most AMD users i know dont want that.
Also this is just typical AIB flexing. Reference designs will have 2x8pin.
And im sure "space efficiency" is paramount on a 3,5 slot behemoth of a card... That some AIB models include a third connector? (one you dont even need to use btw).
What an odd reason to write off entire brand. Leaks say stock is ~260W. These are all AIB models that are supposedly up to 330W.
By your logic Nvidia also f***ed up with 5090 going to 600W from 450W on 4090 despite using a more power efficient node with a slightly larger chip. Exactly. Near the PCIe connector, there should the least PCB warping.
I merely explained that it's not tripling of FPS like some people mistakenly believe who just watch Nvidia marketing.
And that Reflex or AMD's analogue always needs to be used with FG to get the best experience.
it's very good that it's open and not limited to only (select) Nvidia series or cards.
Also im far more impressed with Reflex 2 than i am with DLSS4 MFG. Lossless Scaling (program) already proved that even older cards can generate more than one extra frame so MFG was no surprise to me and more of a natural evolution.
AMD are gaining the benefits of jumping forwards two process nodes AND reverting back to more efficient monolithic silicon AND dropping the memory bus from 320-bit to 256-bit, and having to power fewer memory controllers and GDDR6 packages.
I have no idea WTF point you're trying to make with the 4090 > 5090 example. 5090 has 32% more cores, is higher clocked, has a 33% wider bus, 33% more memory modules to drive, and those GDDR7 modules, despite being 20% more energy efficient than previous-gen VRAM are actually running 80% faster, so a net power drain compared to the 4090's GDDR6X. It seems like you understand neither my original point, nor what causes energy consumption in modern GPU designs.
N5/N5P > 4N > N4/N4P
Regardless of naming or semantics, AMD have a node shrink this generation, Nvidia does not - because Nvidia Blackwell is on the exact same N4 node they were on with Ada.
I mean along the absolute performance, it is very important for AMD to fix the idle power consumption, and to fix the drivers from day 0.
I think AMD needs a halo. The halo sells all the rest. Design a monster GPU on 2nm, even be it a paper launch for a year, but claim that performance crown . . This is quite obvious with the backported Nvidia Blackwell. Something definitely has happened so forced them to return to the earlier process.
Maybe someone gets deep discounts, maybe someone else gets hefty price rises?