Packaging

The Card

The RX 9070 XT Pulse follows the color theme of earlier Pulse GPUs—black and red are the primary colors. You now get a metal "Sapphire" logo near the top edge and some additional detail has been added in that area, too. The metal backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1213 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 60 mm.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1a and two HDMI 2.1b ports.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


There is no lighting on the RX 9070 XT Pulse.


The card uses two 8-pin power connectors, which allow a maximum of 300 W power draw, plus 75 W from the slot.

Teardown

Sapphire's card lets you remove and replace the fan assembly without touching the thermal paste. This makes it easy to fix the fans after a few years if their bearings are worn out.


The Sapphire cooling solution uses five heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.