NVIDIA is Selling Lies | RTX 5070 Founders Edition Review & Benchmarksjimmy_thang March 13, 2025

We analyze the RTX 5070’s specs, pricing, gaming performance, ray tracing, and power efficiency

The Highlights

• The RTX 5070 has 6144 CUDA cores, a 192-bit bus, and 12GB of GDDR7 memory along with an advertised 2.51 GHz boost frequency
• NVIDIA’s claim that the 5070 is on par with a 4090 with MFG is simply not true
• NVIDIA’s marketing here is intentionally manipulative and a misrepresentation of reality
• Original MSRP: $550
• Release Date: March 5, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

NVIDIA is selling lies and reviewers shouldn’t be afraid to mince words. That is precisely what the RTX 5070 is. It was marketed on the back of lies considering NVIDIA stated that the card, which has 12GB of VRAM, would offer 4090, which has 24GB of VRAM, performance for $549 with the help of AI. 
Here’s an NVIDIA-compliant comparison of the RTX 5070 with MFG against the RTX 4090 without any frame generation at all.

Editor's note: This was originally published on March 4, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Mike Gaglione

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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These are really abusive settings, stressing both cards heavily. But NVIDIA said the 5070 would be equal to the 4090 (watch our review), and we’re not even close. The 5070’s spiky behavior is exceeding 200 ms in this like-for-like comparison except that it has MFG. The 4090 isn’t perfect, but WITHOUT any frame generation at all, it’s hitting at worst about 50-60 ms, with an average closer to 26. 

Here’s what that actually looks like. Using NVIDIA’s own FrameView tool, we also get a glimpse into another problem: Latency. The PC Latency on the 4090 was around 51 ms during a like-for-like comparison. 51 is a lot better than what we saw in the 5070 with MFG 4X after 5 minutes of being in the game. That was 500-720 ms. Now, to be fair, if you only played Cyberpunk with these settings for about 15-20 seconds at a time, things look a lot better… 

The 5070 is getting absolutely clobbered for VRAM, which is just 12GB to the 4090’s 24GB. To call these the same is an absolute, flat-out lie. These cards are not the same. In situations where the card runs out of VRAM in particular, it can never dream to be a 4090. It is simply impossible. 

Here’s a quick chart showing passes 1 through 3 of the 5070 as it gets progressively worse with each benchmark pass as the framebuffer fills. The 4090, meanwhile, maintains its performance the entire time.

NVIDIA has got to stop lying. This isn’t just marketing, this is an actual, verifiable lie. But let’s just pretend MFG 4X is somehow a fair comparison against the 4090 in a scenario that’s maybe not VRAM constrained. It’s an OK technology, but it is not a like-for-like comparison because the images themselves are not the same. When you turn it on, it’s like Clive here has 6 feet. 

NVIDIA could have launched its RTX 5070 to mediocre or lukewarm reviews. Instead, it decided to openly lie on stage and manipulate its performance numbers to mislead consumers into thinking an otherwise lukewarm card is equal to the flagship of last generation. NVIDIA, this was avoidable. You are making all of the unforced errors right now. This was a completely unnecessary fumble. We could have just listed all the numbers and called it a day, but now have to start by writing about NVIDIA’s lies and marketing.

RTX 5070 Overview

The RTX 5070 is supposed to have an MSRP of $550. It’s hard to say what it’ll actually be for street pricing. But basing only off of MSRP, that makes this card $50 higher than the MSRP of the RTX 3070 at its launch in 2020 and $50 cheaper than the RTX 4070’s launch MSRP of $600. 

This looks like the patterned NVIDIA stutter-stepping of price slowly upwards, where they overshoot, then bring it back down. We saw this from 10 to 20 to 30 series.

The RTX 5070 GPU has an advertised 6144 CUDA cores, a 192-bit bus, and 12GB of GDDR7 memory. It might even have all of its ROPs. The 5070 Ti has an MSRP at $750 and carries 16 GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus, so there’s more bandwidth, a little more capacity, and an increase to 8960 CUDA cores, and it may even have all of the ROPs that you’re paying for.

Clocks on the 5070 are advertised at 2.51 GHz boost.

RTX 5070 Pricing

A quick glance at pricing breaks it down like this: 

There are 5 MSRP models of the 5070 Ti (read our review) on Newegg, which is just enough to technically claim the MSRP exists. The rest of them are higher, often $900 and over. Board partners have now directly repriced their cards, with VideoCardz noticing that MSI had eliminated all of its $750 RTX 5070 Ti cards just before the 5070 launch. 

As we write this review, following the VideoCardz news post, MSI has now reintroduced two $750 models, dropping from $820 and $840 to $750. NVIDIA has historically applied pressure to partners to make MSRP units available, so it wouldn’t surprise us if the VideoCardz story triggered a reaction to keep two models available. They can also achieve this with rebates.

As for things available right now, we found the RX 7800 XT Pulse for $530 and... that’s it. When we sorted Newegg to $450 to $650 for “in stock” and “sold by Newegg,” meaning no third-party sellers and no unavailable models, all we got were a bunch of refurbished units and the 7800 XT Pulse.

It really is crazy right now.

We’re going to get into the benchmarks next. This review contains most of the games that we benchmark since we’re preparing for the 9070 and 9070 XT launch. We currently have around 50-60 GPUs tested in our lineup, so to fit the charts, we need to remove a few from the chart.

Here’s what we’ve added and removed:

Cards Removed & Added

• We’ve added the RX 7900 GRE (read our review). We won’t be spending time talking about it today since it’ll be replaced tomorrow and will likely be a key comparison for the 9070 series, but it’s on the charts.
• We’re removing either the RTX 4080 (watch our review) or Super (read our review) in every chart, but keeping the other. We’ll favor the Super where we have data for it. These GPUs are within 1-3% of each other and are not worth the chart space. We have more interesting stuff to show.
• We’re removing the 2080 Ti (watch our review), 2080 Super (watch our review), and 2080 (watch our review). Most of these results are available in our previous charts for the 5070 Ti review and are directly comparable.
• We’re removing the 5080 with missing ROPs. You can find that data in a standalone article. 
• And, of course, we’re removing the 9070 and XT -- we can’t show that until tomorrow at the time of this writing.

RTX 5070 Benchmarks

FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is up first for a traditional raster title at 4K, without any bulls*** to artificially inflate numbers.

This game is actually playable on most modern hardware at this resolution. The RTX 5070 ran at 78 FPS AVG, landing it right between the 4070 Ti (watch our review) and the 4070 Ti Super. Maybe we should call it the 4070 Ti V3 instead. The 5070 Ti outperforms the 5070 by 25% here, the 4070 Ti Super is ahead by 11%, and the 7900 XT by 6%.

Going by name only, the generational lead over the 4070 (watch our review) is 30%, or 48% over the 3070 (watch our review) and 118% over the 2070 (watch our review), followed by 244% over the 1070. 

Unfortunately, the 5070 is not better than the 4090 -- but if we were to be artificially intelligent and actually intellectually dishonest, it might be!

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5070 Ti’s lead over the RTX 5070 is reduced to 22% from 25% at 4K. The 5070 is also reduced in its advantage over the 4070 Ti, now just 1% from around 6% at 4K. From 150 FPS to 172 FPS, we now have 3 GPUs from NVIDIA. If you want to make NVIDIA look as ridiculous as possible, you could maximize the size of the clown car by drawing a box from the 4080 Super at 202 FPS to the 4070 FE at 117 FPS. The result is 7 modern NVIDIA GPUs spanning an 85 FPS range. Divided evenly, that would be one GPU for every 12 FPS. In this situation though, 4 of them land within a 36 FPS range: The 5070 Ti, 4070 Ti Super (read our review), 5070, and 4070 Ti mean you can dial it into the individual decimals if you were so picky about your performance.

The 7900 XT (read our revisit) lands in the middle of all of these and has a 12% lead over the RTX 5070, assuming all ROPs are present on the 5070.

The 5070 is, again, not better than the 4090. 

FFXIV 1080p

Remarkably, we still have OK scaling at 1080p for most of these GPUs. The fact that the 9800X3D allows the 5090 (read our review) and 4090 to still have a slight gap at 1080p really speaks to how exciting AMD’s 9800X3D is.

Anyway, the 5070 ran this workload at 225 FPS AVG and fell below the 4070 Ti. No wonder NVIDIA wants everyone using MFG. The 4090, predictably, outperforms the 5070 massively. It’s a 67% gap here.

The 7900 XT now has a reduced lead of 9%.

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Black Myth: Wukong at 4K and rasterized had the 5070 at 40 FPS AVG, giving the 5070 Ti a 27% lead. The 5070 really struggled in this one and ended up tied with the 4070 Ti and, to its benefit, the 7900 XT. We’ll be curious to see how the 9070 does in this one… Surely we don’t already know as we’re writing this and definitely haven’t looked at the results and in no way would we ever encourage you to just wait and see what the results are…

If we were to randomly multiply the frames, it’d be better than the 4090 -- until you randomly multiplied the 4090 with lossless scaling. Jensen’s claim is like a schoolyard argument: The 5070 is infinity times better.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, we re-introduce other 70-class cards of the past. The 5070 FE ran at 72 FPS AVG, with frametime pacing unremarkable. The 5070 is tied with the 4070 Ti and 7900 XT. Generationally by name only, the 5070 improves on the 4070 by 22%, the 3070 by 58%, and the 2070 non-Super by 137%.

The 5070 Ti leads the 5070 by 21% here.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

1080p has the RTX 5070 down at 98 FPS AVG, allowing the 4070 Ti to gain a slight 2% lead. The 5070 Ti is ahead by 17.6% here, assuming all ROPs are present. 

Against the prior cards containing 70 naming, the 5070 is ahead of the 4070 by 18%, the 3070’s 63 FPS AVG by 56%, and the 2070’s 43 FPS by 126%.

Starfield - 4K

Starfield at 4K is up now. The RTX 5070 ran at 54 FPS AVG here, giving the 4070 Ti’s 59 FPS a 9% lead. It’d be interesting if AMD’s 9070 performed similarly to the 7900 XT here since the Hellhound is 20% ahead of the 5070. We’ll find out tomorrow.

The 5070 Ti has a larger lead over the 5070 in this test than the last 1080p benchmark, running a 68 FPS AVG for a 27% advantage over the 5070 FE. Performance of the 5070 over the 2070’s 22 FPS is about 145% ahead.

Starfield - 1440p

1440p significantly reduces the 5070 Ti’s uplift over the 5070, bringing it down to 22% from the prior 27%. The 7900 XT, which is an important comparison in this test for... reasons, runs at 98 FPS AVG with comparable lows to its neighbors. That has it 18% ahead of the RTX 5070’s 83 FPS AVG. 

As for the RTX 4070, the 5070 leads by a paltry 10.6%, then 48% over the 3070’s 56 FPS.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the 5070’s 104 FPS AVG planted it between the 4070 and 4070 Ti again, with an unimpressive 9% improvement on the 4070. The gap shrinks as the resolution decreases in this game. The 5070 Ti is now ahead by only 19%, down from 27% at 4K. As for AMD, its RX 7900 XT is 15% ahead here, down slightly from the 1440p advantage.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 4K is next. This game is relatively heavy on the GPU in our test area, but is unique for its ability to also produce a heavy CPU load in cities.

The RTX 5070 ran at 56 FPS AVG here and had good frametime pacing represented in the lows, but then again, so did everything around it. It’s proportional.

The 5070 very slightly leads the 4070 Ti. 

As for the 4090: We’re still somehow not matching the RTX 4090, which is up at 98 FPS. We must have mistyped the =5070*4 formula that Jensen prescribed reviewers. 

The 5070 Ti leads the 5070 by a much larger 31% in this benchmark, producing one of the most notable jumps yet. The 3090 Ti ran at 64 FPS for a 14% lead over the 5070, which might seem totally non-sequitur and unrelated, but it isn’t.

Anyway, the 7900 XT held a 61 FPS AVG in this one, with the XTX just past the 5070 Ti. 

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5070 basically ties the RTX 4070 Ti again. The 7900 XT’s 104 FPS AVG is just a 9% lead here, with the 4070 Ti Super a slight step above that. The 5070 Ti has a 25% lead over the 5070 here, posting one of its better 1440p comparative results.

Somehow, and we don’t know how this happened, the RTX 4090 just seems to be better than the RTX 5070. That’s just so weird. Maybe we should run NVIDIA Multi-Fraction Generation to divide the 4090 down to a 5070.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the 5070’s 126 FPS AVG has it just behind the 4070 Ti. The 7900 XT leads by only 7% here, with the 5070 Ti knocked down to a 21% lead from 25% at 1440p. The 5070 Ti’s 151 FPS AVG is also about the same as the 7900 XTX, which has its own slight advantage.

As for the 4090, well, ours really must be broken since it’s not making the 5070 look good enough.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 4K

Cyberpunk is up now. We have a more limited data set with this since we updated the game to v2.21 and have been working on re-running everything.

At 4K, the 5070 ran at 41 FPS AVG. That put it 6% ahead of the 4070 Ti and 144% ahead of the 2070, or 68% ahead of the 24 FPS result of the 3070. As for the 5070 Ti, its 50 FPS AVG gives it a 22% lead here, with the 7900 XTX (watch our review) ahead of that at 57 FPS AVG. The 7900 XT has a noteworthy 13% lead against the 5070 here.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 ran at 89 FPS AVG and had lows at 75 FPS 1% and 71 FPS 0.1%. The 5070 Ti at 108 FPS is about 21% ahead, not changing much from 4K. The 7900 XT is ahead of the 5070 in AVG, 1%, and 0.1%, holding a 12% lead in average framerate.

Once again, the 4070 Ti basically ties the 5070, with the latter slightly ahead this time.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1080p

1080p reintroduces other 70-class cards: The 5070 Ti ran at 167 FPS AVG, with the 5070 at 138. That’s still 21%. The 4070 hasn’t been rerun here yet, but the 3070 is present at 85 FPS, yielding a 62% lead to the 5070, followed by the 2070 at 60 FPS for 130%, then the GTX 1070 at 35 FPS AVG. That’s about a 293% improvement to the 5070.

AMD’s RX 7900 XT seems like it’ll be particularly relevant soon. This one ran at 150 FPS AVG, with lows expected at 116 and 104. That’s an 8.8% improvement over the 5070.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

Dying Light 2 is up now. This is another of the heavier games, especially with RT later.

At 4K, the 5070 ran at 56 FPS AVG and struggled in this title, allowing the 5070 Ti an advantage of 25%. The 7900 XT doesn’t look great by comparison here, at 55 FPS AVG itself.

As for the 4070 Ti, it’s again roughly equal. 

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

1440p has the 5070 at 106 FPS AVG, now trading places with the 7900 XT. The 5070 Ti’s lead is reduced to 22%, with the 4070 Ti now falling slightly behind the 5070.

By generational naming, the 4070 ran at 78 FPS AVG (so the 5070 is 36% better) and the 3070 was at 67 FPS AVG (or 60% better on the 5070).

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up last for raster testing. We’re almost through these.

At 4K, the 5070’s 78 FPS AVG has it just behind the 4070 Ti that we’ve been tracking. It’s also about 6 FPS ahead of the 7800 XT, so measurably different but functionally equal. The 5070 Ti’s 107 FPS AVG positions it 36% ahead in this one, which is a huge gain and among the largest we’ve seen. The 7900 XT seems like a good AMD comparison, landing at 100 FPS AVG and leading the 5070 by 28%.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 held a 152 FPS AVG and trailed the 4070 Ti by 8 FPS. The 5070 Ti is 30% higher framerate here, down from 36% at 4K. As we’ve seen, the gap tends to close at lower resolutions, although it’s still a huge gap in this game.

The 7900 XT is now up at 186 FPS AVG, with a reduction in the percentage advantage to 22% from 28% at 4K.

Generationally, the 5070 runs 23% faster than the 124 FPS on the 4070, 54% faster than the 91 FPS on the 3070, and 157% ahead of the 59 FPS for the 2070.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

Finally for raster, we’re now at 1080p for Resident Evil 4. This one is interesting for the further closing of the gap between the 5070 and 5070 Ti, which now ranges from 282 FPS to 224 FPS for a 26% improvement on the Ti. The 7900 XT is about 18% higher framerate here.

RTX 5070 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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We’re moving on to ray tracing now. NVIDIA has historically held significant advantages in some games for ray tracing.

AMD says it has significantly improved its ray tracing performance. We explained why the company is claiming this in our news piece covering the 9070 announcements, so this will become highly relevant in tomorrow’s reviews.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is up first. This is one of the two titles in this RT test suite that heavily favors NVIDIA. We’re testing with upscaling here.

At 4K, the RTX 5070 ran at 40 FPS AVG. That has the 5070 Ti at 30% ahead, with the 4070 Ti about tied with the 5070. AMD doesn’t appear until the 7900 XTX, down at 20 FPS AVG. That’s a massive lead of 99% over the 7900 XTX. The 5070 doubles the 7900 XTX’s performance.

That’s not good for AMD’s last generation. We’ll see if that lead can be halved with the new generation. The 5070 leads the RTX 3080 by 44%. Based on math from AMD’s claims in its presentation, that’s about where it should land here. Too bad no one knows if that’s a good reference point yet.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 Ti ran at 88 FPS AVG, the 5070 at 73 FPS AVG (between the 4070 Ti and 4070 Ti Super), and the original RTX 70-class card ran at 24 FPS AVG. AMD’s best here, as of today and not tomorrow, is the 7900 XTX at 37 FPS AVG.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1080p

Now for 1080p. The 5070 held a 97 FPS AVG here, encroaching on the 4090 but still not beating it. The 5070 Ti leads the 5070 by just 15% in this situation, with the 5070 now ahead of the 4070 Ti and Ti Super cards after slow gains in the other resolutions. The 7900 XTX ran at 49 FPS AVG, closer to a 4060 and behind the 3070. AMD named the 3080 in its slideshow announcing the card. If it lands near that mark, it’d be around or ahead of the 66 FPS AVG result for the FTW3.

Speaking of: EVGA really knew what was coming when it left the GPU market.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is back with RT now. This one is more balanced between the vendors.

At 4K, the 5070 ran at 49 FPS AVG, establishing a 9% lead for the 7900 XT. That’s a similar gap to what we saw without RT. The 5070 Ti leads by 30% again here, with the 7900 XTX leading that. 

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

At 1440p with RT, Dragon’s Dogma 2 puts the 5070 at 83 FPS AVG, reducing the 5070 Ti’s lead to 24%. The 7900 XT sits between both, with the 7900 XTX ahead of the 5070 Ti.

Based on the charts AMD has released, the math would position the 9070 and 9070 XT as flanking the 5070 Ti, but we’ll find out soon enough.

Generationally, the 5070 leads the 4070 by 23%, the 3070’s 51 FPS by 62%, and the 2070 non-Super by 145%.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

Down to 1080p, the 5070 Ti’s lead over the 5070 is now 22%, with the 7900 XTX still leading the Ti and 7900 XT still leading the 5070. The 4070 is relatively close to the 5070 here, now with an 18% advantage to the 5070. 

But maybe the 4090 can breathe some excitement into it. The 4090 ran at 169.2 FPS AVG. If we multiply the 5070 by a billion, that’d put it at 107.4 billion FPS AVG, which is an uplift of 6,347,516.73%. This is clearly the card to get. And as we all know, it’s not possible to multiply the 4090 by arbitrary numbers with lossless scaling because then that would hurt 50-series marketing.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 4K

Dying Light 2 with RT is next. This first one is 4K upscaled. The RTX 5070 ran at 44 FPS AVG here, just below the 4070 Ti. The 7900 XTX held 46 FPS AVG in this one, again showing AMD’s prior deficit in RT performance. It’s not as bad as in Black Myth, but considering the original pricing of the 4070 Ti and 7900 XTX, AMD was in a position that was hard to fight from. We’ll see how the 9070 series compares tomorrow.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 beats the 7900 XT by 13%, falls behind the 4070 Ti, and allows the 5070 Ti, which is basically an RTX 4080 v3 or v4, a lead of 27%.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1080p

At 1080p upscaled, the 5070 produced 116 FPS AVG and again sat just below the 4070 Ti, with the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT flanking the 5070. The 5070 Ti ran at 141 FPS AVG, which will be the number for AMD’s 9070 XT to target.

Generationally, the 5070 leads the 4070 by 25% and 3070 by 58%.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 4K

Resident Evil at 4K upscaled is next. This one has the 5070 at 91 FPS AVG, roughly tying the 4070 Ti once again. The 7900 XT leads the 5070 by 18%, with the 5070 Ti leading by 29%. The 7900 XTX sits ahead of that at 134 FPS AVG.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070’s 149 FPS AVG put it 23% ahead of the 4070 and 70% ahead of the 3070. The 7900 XT leads the 4070 Ti and 5070.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Ultra

Finally for RT, our new Cyberpunk results with the updated game version.

First, with 4K and RT Ultra, the 5070 ran at 17 FPS AVG. This is without upscaling and is intentionally the heaviest workload we run.

That positions it right between the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. That’d be unfortunate positioning if AMD weren’t launching something with better RT in a day, but we’ll have to check in tomorrow for the rank.

The 5070 Ti continues its trend of being NVIDIA’s third or fourth iteration of a 4080 card and leads the 5070 by a huge 56% here. The workload is just too heavy for the 5070 to handle and it has neither the bandwidth or compute capability.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 1080p RT Ultra

Here’s RT Ultra at 1080p. The 5070 held 64 FPS AVG with these settings, putting the 5070 Ti about 32% ahead. The 7900 XTX trails the 5070 here, unfortunately for AMD’s former flagship.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Medium

We also run RT Medium for Cyberpunk. We’ve found that RT Ultra and RT Medium can significantly affect the hierarchical ranking of NVIDIA and AMD, so we run both. NVIDIA runs away at Ultra.

With these settings and at 4K still, the 5070 now runs at 22.5 FPS AVG. This reduces the 5070 Ti’s lead to a more normal 35%. The 5070 just didn’t have the ability to keep up at 4K/RT Ultra.

RTX 5070 Thermals

We’ll keep thermals short and simple. Using our usual benchmark of Port Royal at 4K and looping, we measured the 5070 FE at steady state at around 74 degrees Celsius for GPU core temperature. The memory temperature was about 76 degrees. Both of these numbers are acceptable; memory is well within spec and is completely fine. Core has some room for a hotter computer case. The core temperature isn’t impressive, but is acceptable, and there’s a little bit of buffer there.

The 5070 FE’s fans ran at about 2500 RPM to maintain this temperature. We skipped acoustic testing this time since we have the two 9070 reviews we have to get through. 

RTX 5070 Power Efficiency

For efficiency as usual, we use a power interposer in between the GPU and the power supply. That means we’re intercepting slot power and the PCIe power through the cables and we do that so we can isolate the GPU entirely, measure its power consumption during a workload. Then we take the frame rate numbers to do some simple math and produce an efficiency number. 

In these charts, you’ll get a few things. You’ll get the total power consumption for that workload in watts and you also get its efficiency in FPS per watt not workload-normalized so we allow it to run at the frame rate that it can naturally run at. 

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

For efficiency with Final Fantasy 14 at 4K, we ended up with this data. This chart isn’t as dense as our 1440p chart that’s up next.

The 5070 FE ran at 0.33 FPS/W here, pulling 233W during the workload. The 5070 Ti pulled 264W, allowing it an improvement in efficiency to 0.37 FPS/W. AMD’s prior RX 7900 XT wasn’t particularly efficient, giving NVIDIA a large advantage in efficiency for the 5070. The FPS was close enough to be mostly observably equal to a player, but the 7900 XT ran at just 0.25 FPS/W from its 324W power draw during the test.

We’ll have to see what the 9070 series does to improve this, as this has been one of AMD’s GPU weaknesses over the years.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 ran at 0.65 FPS/W. That puts the 5070 Ti as about 12% more efficient than the 5070 when producing a variable workload. The AMD 7900 XT pulled 325W in this test, landing at 0.53 FPS/W. Its framerate is higher, but the power is also disproportionately higher, which hurts its efficiency despite a higher framerate.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1080p

At 1080p, the 5070 hits nearly 1 FPS/W. The 4060 Ti has passed it for efficiency, with the 5070 Ti improved by 0.11 FPS/W on top of the 5070’s 1.0 result. The 7900 XT is down at 0.75 FPS/W and is still pulling about the same power as previously.

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

F1 24 at 4K and with ray tracing is up next. In this one, the 5070 produced 0.17 FPS/W, pulling close to TDP at 246W in order to produce its hardly playable framerate. The 5070 Ti ran at 0.20 FPS/W, with the 4080 ranking at the top for its balance of power and framerate. Note that bar size changes from numbers that look the same are valid -- it’s just from the hidden decimal places.

The 7900 XT ran at 0.12 FPS/W, a significant fall from the 5070’s result. The 9070 series has a lot of work to do here.

Efficiency: F1 24 1080p

At 1080p and still with RT, the 5070 ran at 0.55 FPS/W, again giving the 5070 Ti a 13% efficiency advantage. We’re curious to see where the 9070 and 9070 XT land. The 7900 XT isn’t competitive in efficiency, with a lot of this particular result being because of its relatively low RT performance last generation. That’s what AMD is trying to tackle.

Efficiency: Black Myth 1080p

In Black Myth without RT and at 1080p, the 5070 Ti held a 0.53 FPS/W rank, putting it in the second slot. The 5070 is at 0.48, with the 4060 Ti still trading back-and-forth depending on the test. The 7800 XT was at 0.31 FPS/W, with the 7900 XT just below that. The 5070 is not NVIDIA’s most power efficient card due to the performance trade-offs, but is relatively efficient overall.

Efficiency: Dragon’s Dogma 2 RT 1440p

In Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 1440p and with RT, the RTX 5070 ranked at 0.36 FPS/W, sandwiching it between the 4090 that it’s not better than and the 5090. The 7900 XT is down at 0.28 FPS/W, yielding an efficiency benefit in a non-normalized framerate workload of 29%. That’ll be the mark for the 9070 series to hit.

Efficiency: Starfield 1440p

Finally, in Starfield rasterized at 1440p, the 5070 ran at 0.43 FPS/W and landed just below the 4090, which it remains not better than, again. The 7800 XT (read our review) from AMD ran at 0.32 FPS/W, so AMD has a lot of ground to gain here tomorrow. This will be an area we’ll focus to test for improvements, as theoretically, it should be better than it was.

RTX 5070 Conclusion

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One thing’s for certain: NVIDIA’s marketing about the 5070 being a 4090 was wrapped entirely in bull**** and built on a foundation of manure, which is only fitting for a company whose CEO is never found without a leather jacket.

The GPU market is insane right now. The fact that we sorted Newegg for $450 to $650 GPUs and got basically one is insane. The current buying experience matches that of the COVID-era boom around late 2020 and the 2017 crypto mining boom. That makes it hard to evaluate value, and broadly speaking, we’d say to just wait for things to cool off if your current machine can last you a bit longer. You’ll likely save money as pricing settles. If that doesn’t matter to you, maybe time will -- and unless you get lucky and snipe an early stock of the cards, you may at least save some time.

As for its value, we’re going to kick the can to tomorrow’s reviews of the 9070 XT and 9070. We don’t think you should buy this card until you learn about AMD’s competition, as the on-paper price is in similar territory. We’ll see how the in-reality price is for both of them.
Check back for the 9070 XT and 9070 reviews.

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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU Review & Benchmarks vs. 9800X3D, 285K, 9950X, & Morejimmy_thang March 12, 2025

We put the 9950X3D through numerous gaming and productivity benchmarks, efficiency tests, and more

The Highlights

• 9950X3D is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with a 5.7 GHz max advertised boost clock and 128MB of L3 cache
• The 9950X is a better value for pure productivity and the 9800X3D is a better value for pure gaming
• The 9950X3D is a compelling CPU for both heavy production workloads and gaming
• Original MSRP: $700
• Release Date: March 12, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

The quick version up front: The 9950X3D is comparable to the 9800X3D in most gaming scenarios, sometimes trading places; in production, it’s similar to the 9950X. The biggest change has been to the setup, which AMD says should now be simplified from prior dual-CCD parts with one faster CCD and one extra V-cache CCD. Historically, setting this up properly has made it necessary to isolate drives. If you were to install a 7600X and upgrade to a 7950X3D later, the easiest thing to do would be a clean Windows install (although there were ways to avoid this). That should be fixed now, but we’re still keeping all our drives isolated.

AMD is launching its R9 9950X3D CPU. This is a 16-core, 32-thread part with a listed MSRP of $700. The $600 MSRP 9900X3D will be launching alongside it, but wasn’t sampled, which is normally not a good sign.

Editor's note: This was originally published on March 11, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan
Mike Gaglione

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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But as we all know, MSRP often doesn’t hold at launch as new silicon gets sold at higher prices. We just uploaded an entire video digging into that. In either case, for these CPUs, we definitely wouldn’t pay over MSRP since the 9950X (read our review) is available regularly for $545, with the 9800X3D (read our review) for gaming at $480 (which is MSRP) as we write this. That may change, of course.

Today, we’re reviewing the 9950X3D. It’s been a long review cycle the past 3 months, so we’re going to keep this one simple and focus on the numbers.

9950X3D Overview

Let’s get straight into it today. We’ll start with the specs.

The AMD 9950X3D is part of the Zen 5 architecture that launched with the 9700X (read our review) and other CPUs last year. The 9800X3D swooped-in a little later and cleaned-up what was a confusing and messy launch, largely making major moves for gaming CPUs and giving us something to be excited about as it’s a really good CPU.

The 9950X3D is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with a 5.7 GHz max advertised boost, 4.3 GHz base clock, and L3 cache at 128 MB. TDP target is 170W.

For comparison, the normal 9950X also has a max advertised boost of 5.7 GHz, base of 4.3 GHz, and TDP of 170W. These are shared. The cache changes, at 64 MB of L3.

The 9950X3D has two CCDs, with one of the two CCDs bearing extra cache. This is stacked vertically. As we described in the 9800X3D review, the cache this time is flipped so that it’s closer to the substrate than the lid, pushing the cores closer to the IHS. In the 9800X3D review, we demonstrated how this helped significantly with cooling.

9950X3D Testing

We’re keeping it incredibly simple this time. As always, you can find our test bench information published here. 

For gaming tests, we have all new data including the latest Windows updates and microcode for everything. That means we’ve refreshed the data set and wiped out what we had, so every CPU you that has been run was done in the last 3 days or so. We got the important ones in there. For production, we were able to salvage a lot of data since it’s the same.

We’ve been completely buried by one GPU after another in an onslaught of benchmarks and follow-ups the last few weeks, so for this one, we’re sticking to the basics.

Let’s just get into it.

Frequency Tests

Frequency - Blender All-Core

Frequency analysis is up first. We do this testing to ensure the CPUs are functioning as expected and to help explain the performance later.

First up is the Blender all-core workload. In this test, the 9950X3D had a frequency plot that started at about 5250 MHz, but settled closer to 5020 MHz to 5080 MHz during testing. This chart is intentionally zoomed-in to make it easier to see, so the scale purposefully does not start at 0.

For comparison, the 9950X non-3D (read our review) had higher peaks, but similar valleys. It ranged from 5010 MHz to 5080 MHz. In terms of average frequency over the course of the test, the 9950X3D averaged 5038 MHz all core to the 9950X’s 5036 MHz, but the X3D CPU did so with fewer peaks and more level frequencies in the middle of its range. We think this will be beneficial to it in gaming. 

The 9800X3D 5220 MHz all-core, putting it well above both. This will help it in some specific workloads, but obviously the lower core count will set it back elsewhere.

Frequency - Cinebench 1C

The next chart is for frequency in a Cinebench single thread workload. This has the 9950X3D up in the range of 5650 to 5725 MHz, which hits AMD’s advertised frequency of 5.7 GHz. The 9950X holds its frequency steadier and with fewer dips between tile cycles, but is overall comparable.

The 9800X3D holds 5225 MHz throughout the test so it’s lower than both when in a single-threaded workload in this situation.

9950X3D Game Benchmarks

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is up now. This one had the AMD R9 9950X3D at 155 FPS AVG, technically becoming a new chart topper. The 9800X3D was our chart topper last time and is now functionally tied with the 9950X3D as the best CPU on the chart.

The good news is that the 9950X3D doesn’t appear to be suffering from its dual-CCD approach, so parking is functioning properly and the CPU is not hamstrung by its extra threads. 

The 9950X3D outranks the 7950X3D by similar margins as the 9800X3D did: It’s 23% higher average framerate, with lows comparable for the average. The 7950X3D (watch our review) outdid the 7950X, which we’re using old data for but should be no greater than 2-3% different based on our study of this test, by 29%. That’s with proper setup for the 7950X3D this time.

As compared to the 9950X at 101 FPS AVG, the 9950X3D outdid it by 54%. The 9950X is closer to the 7950X (watch our review) for performance, which makes sense. This game really benefits from the extra cache.

In fact, an easy example of this is the 5700X3D (read our review) vs. the 5600X3D (read our review): In some games, the 5600X3D outperforms the 5700X3D because of its higher clock rate. In this instance, the cache and core count was more beneficial than the frequency.

The 5800X3D (watch our review) remains an excellent CPU, up at 119 FPS AVG. The 9950X3D and 9800X3D outrank it by about 30%. As for Intel, it remains uncompetitive here. The 285K is getting crushed by two prior Intel generations for reasons discussed in that review, and that’s with new Windows updates.

Stellaris

Stellaris is one of our favorite CPU benchmarks because it looks at time rather than framerate, which is the most tangible to a user and the most directly influenced by the CPU. Players of 4X or other grand strategy games like Total War with the campaign map, Galactic Civilizations IV with turn pacing (and that’s a great game, if you haven’t played it), and Civilization would also see value here.

For Stellaris, the 9800X3D and 9950X3D both perform at the top of the chart. The 9800X3D outperformed the 9950X3D with a reduction in simulation time of 5%. That’s near error, but not quite. This seems to be a combination of a higher base clock and utilization.

The 9950X3D is definitely working as expected, though, because it’s outperforming the 9950X significantly. The simulation time requirement drops by almost 15%, from 32.3 seconds to 27.6 seconds.

This is the one game where Zen 5 in particular had stronger gains over Zen 4, with the 9700X doing well here and proving that. That’s from IPC uplift overall, where Zen 5 is benefitted.

Intel’s 285K is competitive with the 7800X3D and 9700X, at least. The 14900K (read our review) and 14700K (read our review) are within error of each other.

Dragon’s Dogma 2

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, the 9950X3D leads the chart. It landed at 132 FPS AVG here, passing the 9800X3D by a measurable but irrelevant 3.2%. Both CPUs lead all of Intel’s, although Intel at least lands its prior two generations ahead of the 7950X3D and 7800X3D with the game’s updates. This game really seems to benefit from extra cache, with the 9950X3D leading the 9950X by 46% and the 9800X3D leading the 9700X (although they have other differences) by 41%. Dragon’s Dogma 2 remains heavy on CPUs in NPC-intensive areas.

The 285K continues to impress with how much of a downgrade it is from not only AMD’s current generation, but Intel’s past generations.

We added the older results for the 3700X and 2600 to this chart. We noticed that performance on older generations hasn’t changed much. At most, there might be a 5% change here, but we don’t think so. Even with that though, anything is an upgrade.

Intel has seen the most upgrade since our last round of tests. This game has gotten updates, so it’s possible some of those were targeted at Intel. Windows updates could also affect it. We consistently saw uplift across Intel’s CPUs. That’s shifted the relative ranking of the 14th and 13th gen against the 7800X3D (watch our review).

Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail - 1080p

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is up now. In this one, the 9800X3D ran at 380 FPS AVG, with the 9950X3D at 373 FPS AVG. We observed relatively wide run-to-run variance in some of these results, so the error bars are wider than typical. The 9800X3D leads the 9950X3D by just 2%, so they are functionally equal.

The 9950X3D bests its 9950X non-3D variant by 50 FPS or so, or 16% here in average framerate. The 1% lows are also significantly improved, indicating that frametime pacing is keeping up with improvements in the average framerate.

The improvement over the 7950X3D is 5.8%.

Intel’s closest CPUs don’t appear until the 14900K at 310 FPS AVG. This is mostly interesting because there was a time when Final Fantasy’s prior benchmark versions were entirely dominated by Intel, with the clean division halfway down the chart. This is actually what we’re seeing now favoring AMD, relegating Intel to the bottom. That’s flipped in recent years and generations.

Intel’s 285K underperforms against its prior two generations. There was no change in performance against last time for the 285K. Intel’s one advantage in this test is frametime pacing, where the 0.1% lows indicate that Intel’s CPUs generally have more consistent frame-to-frame intervals than AMD’s CPUs, although not by an amount that’d change your experience in a noticeable way.

The 5600X3D outperforms the 5700X3D in this game. This has been known and is because of the higher clock speed on the 5600X3D, which proves more valuable than the extra cores.

Final Fantasy XIV - 1440p

At 1440p, the top of the chart truncates as a result of GPU limitations on the RTX 4090 (watch our review). We’ll move to a 5090 (read our review) for our full revamp of CPU testing for the next major architecture, but for now, this is where we cap-out. We’re sure this is deeply disappointing to all 12 of you who have an RTX 5090.

The 9800X3D and 9950X3D are about the same once again. The 7950X3D is also now about the same, as is the 9700X, thanks to the external limitations. This is a good reminder that the gains once scaling graphics are most seen in time-based situations or in seriously heavy CPU games like Dragon’s Dogma 2, but otherwise, most of the time you’ll get the most uplift from a GPU.

Starfield

In Starfield, we had the 9950X3D at 171 FPS AVG, leading the 9800X3D’s 165 FPS by 3%. The 9800X3D was notably ahead of the 7800X3D and the 9950X3D continued that, though neither had as revolutionary of a gain as we’ve seen in other benchmarks.

The 14900K trails the 7800X3D, improving upon its prior round result in a meaningful way; however, because of the improvements we’re seeing in the prior generations, the 285K now falls back behind Intel’s 14900K in this test. The 285K still regresses and generally embarrasses Intel, trailing even the 13700K (watch our review). Intel has continually tweaked its microcode on these prior generations, so it’s possible that they rolled-out a microcode that had lost some performance at some point and they’ve regained some now with the 13th and 14th series. We update BIOS to the newest version for each round.

Against the 9950X at 124 FPS AVG, the 9950X3D improves by 37%. That’s one of the larger gains. Of course, if you’re not going to use the extra cores, the 9800X3D makes more sense for value.

Cyberpunk 2077 - 1080p/Medium

Cyberpunk 2077 is back in our CPU test suite again with the Phantom Liberty expansion. Tested at 1080p/medium here, the 9800X3D and 9950X3D both ran at about 219 FPS AVG and were well within run-to-run variance at only fractions of a frame per second apart. The 7800X3D trails, but not by much. It’d be roughly the same experience as these two.

The lead of the 9950X3D over the 9950X is 37% again, matching some of the other games. The Intel 200 series outdoes the prior generations here, finally, with the 285K at 170 FPS AVG. Unfortunately, that’s still below the AM4 5700X3D and 5600X3D.

F1 24 - 1080p

F1 24 at 1080p is up now. This one has the 9950X3D and 9800X3D again roughly tied, with the 7800X3D not far behind. The advantage is only 7%. The 9950X3D leads the 9950X non-3D variant by 29%, slightly reduced from the advantage seen in other games. We might be hitting a GPU limit here.

Intel’s 14900K is its closest competition, released in 2023, with the 285K down at 9950X levels. The 5600X3D and 5700X3D results show again that this game likes frequency and IPC to some extent.

F1 24 - 1440p

1440p is almost exactly the same in the bottom half, with the top switching around due to GPU overhead and limitations on GPU scaling. The 5800X3D falls down the ranks as the 14th and 13th gen handle the overhead a little better and with more stable frametime pacing, which helps the average. Otherwise, things are about the same sans limitations of scaling for the 9950X3D.

9950X3D Production Benchmarks

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We’re moving on to production tests now. This is where the 16-core CPUs do well. Historically, we’ve seen the X3D variants of all of these CPUs underperform against the non-X3D parts due to power allocation to allow higher boosting. Extra cache doesn’t help in our testing here normally. We’ll see if the 9950X3D breaks that general trend.

Blender Rendering

Blender testing hasn’t changed since our October round. We ran validation on several CPUs and the results came out basically identically, so we can keep a lot of data for more comparisons. This should help those of you on older hardware because we’ve got more present here.

The 9950X3D required 6.6 minutes to complete the render, which is about tied with the 9950X. It was technically faster, but in reality, these are tied. That’s good news for the X3D part, though: Past X3D CPUs, like the 7950X3D, have been technically slightly slower than their non-3D equivalents. That’s not because of scheduling or parking, but because the frequency is slower in an all-core workload.

Another good example is the 7800X3D, which was slower than the 7700X by time required, or 5800X3D as slower than the 5800X. The 9950X3D is the first to break this trend in a big way. Technically, the 9800X3D looked like it was doing that against the 9700X, but the power target was what brought most of that change.

The 9950X3D outperforms the 285K here, with about a 7% reduction in total time required to complete the render.

Chromium Code Compile

Chromium code compile in Windows is another where the data set hasn’t changed, so we were able to salvage it after validation. The 9950X3D required 81 minutes to complete the compile, which is comparable to the time required for the 9950X, but technically improved. This puts it marginally ahead of the freshly retested 285K, with a reduction in time required to compile from 285K to 9950X3D of 4.7% less time required. The 14900K required 88 minutes here, with the 265K at 98 minutes. 

The 9950X3D is the new leader in our compile test. This is not going to be representative of every type of code compile, just like none of these tests is representative of every angle of a use case; however, the way we test it, the 9950X3D is the new leader short of going to Threadripper.

7-Zip Compression

Data for decompression and compression can’t be salvaged, so it’s all new.

In 7-Zip file compression testing, the 9950X3D led the chart at 206,643 MIPs, or millions of instructions per second. That has it just ahead of the 9950X by 3.3%. This is one of the tests where cache can help, depending on its implementation. The 5600X3D and 5600X are good examples of this: The X3D part has a lower advertised frequency, but manages to still roughly tie the 5600X.

The 9950X3D outperforms the 7950X3D by 8.5%, which completed 191K MIPS. The 14900K is next at roughly 189K MIPS, then the 13900K (watch our review). The 285K follows all of these, down at 179K MIPS. 

Core count clearly matters in this test: The 3950X 16-core CPU is outperforming the 5900X 12-core CPU and 9700X 8-core CPU.

7-Zip Decompression

In 7-Zip Decompression, we measured the 9950X3D at 277K MIPS, with the 9950X non-3D at 272K MIPS. You wouldn’t really benefit from the 9950X3D in a meaningful way in either compression or decompression in this workload. The 9950X achieves all of the performance already, so you’d need use cases that more directly leverage the cache to get value out of the 9950X3D.

Intel’s 14900K is its closest competitor, followed by the 14700K and then the 285K.

Adobe Premiere

We saved some of the data for Adobe Premiere as well. The biggest swing was to Intel’s 12th to 14th Gen CPUs here, where we saw some movement from the Windows updates recently. Most of the other parts stayed relatively stationary. Any 12th to 14th Gen CPUs with data prior to this round would move around a bit, so be aware of that; however, just to try and offer some extra data that’s still mostly comparable, we’ve left those parts here. Most of this data is brand new.

The 9950X3D scored 11600 points in the Puget suite aggregate extended scoring for Premiere, which puts it at the top of the chart. It bests the 9950X by 5.8%, with the 14900K closest to it, then the 285K. The improvement over the 7950X non-3D is 7%.

9950X3D Efficiency

We’ll keep power and efficiency testing short this time and just show a couple situations.

Starfield

In Starfield, the 9950X3D ended up at 1.7 FPS/W, putting it behind the 7950X3D and 7800X3D, but tied with the 5700X3D and 9800X3D. The 9950X3D pulled 98.8W when playing this game, and Starfield is one of our games that most heavily loads the CPU (but is still nothing like an all-core Blender workload).

The 9950X non-3D part pulled 168W in this same test, putting it down at 0.7 FPS/W. That means the 9950X pulled nearly 70W more than the 9950X3D, or about a 70% increase in power consumption despite running at a lower framerate. In terms of FPS/W, the 9950X3D is both higher framerate and lower power, and so it is far more efficient. It’s still not as efficient as the low-power 7800X3D, though.

7-Zip Compression

7-Zip compression shows that the 9950X3D can still be power-hungry. In our compression efficiency testing, the 9950X3D pulled 203.8W. That put it at 1014 MIPS/W, which makes it less efficient than about half the chart. The CPU is the best performer, but not for efficiency and that’s because it’s pulling 204W, its efficiency has decreased compared to some others.

The 9950X scored 979 MIPS/W and pulled the same power at 204W, making it less efficient than the 9950X3D. The 7800X3D is a lower performer overall, and in big ways, but has such impressively low power consumption that it ends up being the most efficient.

Of course, if you were serious about running this kind of workload all the time, you’d still want something more powerful than the 7800X3D.

7-Zip Decompression

Decompression testing looks better for the 16-core parts, with the 7950X3D proving incredibly efficient here, followed by an impressive result from the 7950X non-3D with ECO Mode enabled. The 9950X3D ran at 1358 MIPS/W, putting it slightly ahead of the 9950X. They’re still in the middle of this chart though.

9950X3D Conclusion

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That’s it. You have the numbers.

For the quickest recap: For gaming, you can think of the 9950X3D like a 9800X3D. We didn’t run into any major issues with the 9950X3D here. That in and of itself is kind of an accomplishment for AMD. The company has really struggled over the years with the dual CCDs, where one has the extra X3D cache on it. Over the years, it’s taken them some time to get to a place where it’s not regressive and where it’s a little easier to set up. The 9950X3D does appear to do that in our experience so far and that is a major improvement for AMD. It’s taken them some generations to get there.  

If you have the funds and are looking to build a purely gaming computer, we think you should scale it down and go for a 9800X3D. It’s just not that big of a difference as the 9800X3D often trades places with the 9950X3D and you save some money. 

Intel, on the other hand, is out of this conversation right now. They are not part of the high-end expensive CPU for gaming build scenario at the moment. 

Meanwhile, the 9950X makes sense for production-heavy builds that don’t have an explicit use for that extra cache. There’s definitely use-cases for this out there. We see a little bit of that in our 7-Zip testing, but for the most part in the things we test, it doesn’t tend to benefit from the extra cache in non-gaming scenarios. 

Where the 9950X3D, and the other X3D 16-core parts, shine is a more limited use case where you have some mix of really heavy production and really heavy gaming. If you do a lot of compression, decompression, maybe render things on the CPU, are heavy into Premiere, or do a lot of code compiles and play a lot of games, then that’s kind of the use case for the CPU. 

If you’re in one camp or the other exclusively, then you can save some money by going for either a 9800X3D or a 9950X.

We wouldn’t pay more than MSRP for the 9950X3D. CPUs tend to stick closer to MSRP, but can still have stupid prices from some retailers or third-party sellers.

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Investigating NVIDIA’s Defective GPUs: RTX 5080 Missing ROPs Benchmarksjimmy_thang March 10, 2025

We take a look at an RTX 5080 with missing ROPs and benchmark its performance against a non-defective model

The Highlights

• The RTX 5080 is supposed to have 112 ROPs, but we purchased one with 104
• NVIDIA shipped some RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs with missing ROPs
• This is a major defect that can have a performance impact

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today we’re looking at a deficient RTX 5080 Founders Edition (read our review) that’s missing ROPs, meaning it came straight from NVIDIA and that NVIDIA had complete and total end-to-end control over the entire process, just like they want, and they still somehow f***ed it up. The normal 5080 is as much as 10-11% better than this deficient one. Sometimes it’s 0%, often it’s 3-8%, but the swings can be large. This is a huge problem because most users won’t ever notice if their GPUs are missing ROPs. Unfortunately, the masses probably won’t even know about this problem to begin with.

Here’s what’s going on:

Editor's note: This was originally published on March 2, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Editing, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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We traded a functional Zotac 5080 (read our review) to our viewer, Mason, for his defective 5080. Thanks for the trade, Mason.

We have confirmed and validated that this GPU is missing 8 of its ROPs, down at 104 ROPs from the expected 112 ROPs. That means the proper card has nearly 8% more ROPs than the defect. 

This is a huge problem. There are no obvious signs that this issue is present without knowing to look for it, which screws mainstream owners. There will absolutely be defective units out there without people knowing, and we don’t think NVIDIA has done enough to draw attention to this issue. You’d have to know to launch GPU-Z, then know to check the ROPs, then recognize that the count is wrong. That knowledge and skill will be way more common for this audience than most, but even then, most people aren’t going to feel a need to validate the GPU they bought has each individual fixed function unit present.

NVIDIA needs to do better about notifying customers. NVIDIA may claim 0.5%, but from first-hand experience in our inbox alone, we have a hard time believing the count is that low -- especially since it didn’t name the 5080. Either NVIDIA didn’t know about the 5080, in which case it’s wrong about the defect rate, or it did know and it was disingenuous at best by leaving it out. We’re not sure which is worse. We’ve received dozens of emails and messages about units deficient in ROPs count, which seems awfully high for a focused audience with seemingly low distribution of the card so far.

That’s the backstory. Let’s get into the testing.

A “ROP” is a raster operations pipeline (or render output unit) and is a core part of the GPU. 

We already explained this in-depth in a video about this topic. Here’s the basics: The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture for gaming GPUs looks like this block diagram at most. 

Each GPC has 8 TPCs, with two groups of 8 ROPs assigned separately to groupings of 4 TPCs. In some 5090, 5070 Ti, and now 5080s, one of these banks of 8 ROPs appears to be disabled, or at least not functioning.

As we said before, the weird thing is that this shouldn’t have been possible on the 5080. The 5080 should be a full GB203 die, and so there are no disabled SMs on a GB203 RTX 5080 unlike a 5090 or a 5070 Ti where some of the stuff is turned off and there could be collateral damage under traditional understanding. 

Maybe some poor TSMC or NVIDIA employee knocked over a coffee mug and hit the KILLROPS.EXE key on the 5080 production run or something. Whatever the case is, it has an impact.

Over the years, we’ve seen GPUs with a ROPs advantage and iso other conditions typically show their benefit in higher resolution scenarios or in heavily anti-aliased testing. ROPs perform some of the final stages in the rendering pipeline. Of the 3 resolutions we test, 4K will show the biggest impact, but scenes with a lot of blending or some types of anti-aliasing will also reflect the change.

NVIDIA acknowledged this issue shortly after it emerged, but only for the 5070 Ti (read our review) and 5090 (read our review). It almost immediately somehow knew exactly how many units were affected, which further reinforces our belief that NVIDIA would have known about this, with the company pinning it to 0.5% of units. The company did not name the 5080 -- it also didn’t really apologize and we felt it downplayed the performance impact to the lowest number, which would be 4% on the 5090. It didn’t mention that the 5070 Ti and 5080 impact would be greater.

After Mason’s card showed up on Reddit, NVIDIA issued a second statement that we’re going to call their “oopsies” statement, where they confirmed the 5080 was also affected.

RTX 5080 Missing ROPs Benchmarks

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Let’s get into some simple performance numbers. We only really need two basics:

1 - The impact to performance against the normal 5080, which can be done in a simple A/B chart

2 - The change in relative positioning versus nearby alternatives

We’re going to keep the charts really focused and simple because we don’t need much to show the evidence of performance impact.

Performance Recap: 4K Raster

This chart shows the head-to-head in average FPS for the two 5080 cards. Some games are almost exactly identical: Baldur’s Gate 3 predictably is CPU-bound, but it’s nice to know that a CPU-bound scenario didn’t force a gap. Black Myth: Wukong was remarkably consistent and Final Fantasy 14 was within 1 FPS for this testing, but there are some differences.

Total War: Warhammer 3 is the most concerning of these. This one has always rooted-out the most erratic behaviors in testing and that’s why we keep it around. Across all 3 resolutions, we saw major swings. At 4K, we observed an 11% improvement with the actual RTX 5080 rather than the deficient one. That is a difference as big as the gap between some of NVIDIA’s models entirely.

Dying Light 2 also consistently showed a gap: The full 5080 ran 8.7% higher framerate for average FPS than the deficient one. F1 24 showed a 3.3% improvement with all ROPs, with Resident Evil 4 at 1.6%, which is outside our run-to-run variance and makes it a real result, and Starfield at 2.3%. 

Performance Recap: 1440p Raster

At 1440p, we saw an 8.8% improvement with all ROPs in Dying Light 2, which matches our 4K results. Final Fantasy is at about 2%, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is at 2.5%, and F1 24 is at 0.8%. 

Comparative Charts

Let’s look at how this impacts the relative ranking versus other cards. We’ll look at only the games with the largest impact for a worst-case scenario.

Total War: Warhammer - 4K

Here’s Total Warhammer III result at 4K. The 5080 “Reduction of Performance” variant ran at 82 FPS AVG, a significant reduction from the correct result of 91 FPS AVG. Before, the 5080 was tied with the 7900 XTX and within error. Now, the 7900 XTX outperforms the 5080 by 12%. That is a huge swing and makes the 7900 XTX significantly better value. Sure, the partners might help you replace a defective model; however, that’d require noticing it.

The gap over the not-ROPs-deficient 5070 Ti is also reduced to nothing. This particular title and the way we test it is highly reactive to this defect.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, the 5080 Special Edition landed between the stock model and the 7900 XTX, cutting the gap in half. This significantly harms the value of the RTX 5080. The lead is reduced from 10% to 5%. Literally halved. The lead over the 5070 Ti is also cut, now 9.4% from 15%.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

1080p shows the 5080 Regression of Performance edition at 157.1 FPS AVG from 165, which reduces it to equal the 4080 (watch our review). Before, they were functionally equal. Now, they’re literally equal. The 5080’s lead over the 5070 Ti was 9%. Now it’s 3.8%. It was cut into a third of the benefit, basically. The 7900 XTX now is nearly within run-to-run variance of the 5080 defect.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

We’ll just look at one more. In Dying Light 2 at 4K, the RTX 5080 normal card ran at 81 FPS AVG, with the 5080 ROPs defect card at 74.5 FPS AVG. The 5080 was 11.7% ahead of the 7900 XTX, but is now only 2.8% ahead. 

Conclusion

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If you had bought the 5080 instead of the 7900 XTX because of the expectation and ended up with a defect, this is a big problem because now the ranking shuffles. If you don’t notice and you keep using the defective device, you’re going to get screwed. You’ll be stuck with something worse than you thought. 

Checking for this is really easy. When you buy a 50 series card, the first thing you should do is check for all of the ROPs to make sure that your card is not affected. 

You have to do a clean install of the drivers. If you check GPU-Z without the drivers installed, it will reference a look-up table and tell you the correct amount even if they’re not present. So you need to install the drivers first and then install the latest version of GPU-Z and look for ROPs. 

Then look at the image above to see how many ROPs should be present. 

If what you have differs from what it should be, you absolutely need to seek a refund or replacement, but we’d encourage a refund as it’s the fastest path. 

There is absolutely a performance impact and NVIDIA’s approach of “just reach out and we’ll make it right” is completely unacceptable. They also left out the 5080. The company deserves to get raked over the coals for this. Most users will not notice this.

NVIDIA originally said the problem was with 1 ROP instead of 8 ROPs.

We did take apart the card and observed no physical difference to the die with the text looking the same. It also has the same branding. 

This puts a cap on what has been an utter disaster of a launch for NVIDIA. One or two mistakes is understandable, but the totality of these mistakes is insane, especially for the prices they are going for.

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Incredibly Efficient: AMD RX 9070 GPU Review & Benchmarks vs. 9070 XT, RTX 5070jimmy_thang March 7, 2025

We analyze the RX 9070’s specs, gaming performance, ray tracing benchmarks, power efficiency, and more

The Highlights

• The RX 9070 uses AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture and has 56 compute units and 16GB GB of GDDR6 memory
• The 9070 XT performs roughly 9-12% better than the 9070 in most of the games we tested
• The RX 9070 is one of the most efficient GPUs on the market
• Original MSRP: $550
• Release Date: March 6, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

The RX 9070 non-XT’s MSRP is $550, with the XT 9% higher at $600 MSRP. That makes the XT version just 9% more expensive. Despite the similar pricing, the 9070 actually remains really interesting on its own.
First of all, in some of our efficiency tests when looking at performance per watt, it nearly tied for the most efficient GPU. This seems to be in the so-called “sweet spot” of power and performance in what would be a huge upset favoring AMD. The fact that it’s starting to chip away at one of NVIDIA’s key areas of competition is huge. The reason for that is simply because the 9070 pulls a lot less power than the 9070 XT by percentage but most of the performance remains.

Editor's note: This was originally published on March 6, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Mike Gaglione

Efficiency QC

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The quickest possible version is this: For the 9070 XT vs. the 9070, the XT model is in the range of 9% to 16% better at 4K and 1440p rasterized, but typically is about 11-13% better than the 9070 in our suite of tested games. At 1080p, it’s 6% to 15% better, with most cases around 9% to 11% for the games we tested.

As for the RTX 5070, it’s not looking good for NVIDIA’s card you shouldn’t buy: At 4K and rasterized, the 9070 leads the 5070 by 0% to 18%, depending on game. It has one loss in Final Fantasy and it has losses in some ray tracing tests, but not all of them, which is interesting.

The 5070 is basically out of the conversation, so we’re left with the 9070 XT or the 9070 at this price point -- which is what AMD probably wants, because the 9070 is priced in a way that the 9070 XT becomes an easy upsell. That might be to do with yields. If they’re yielding enough XTs that they don’t really want to sell non-XTs, maybe that’s the strategy. 

We’re not going to spend much time on the specs and architecture today. We’re also going to speedrun the charts and shorten the comparisons. If you want the full depth, check out our 9070 XT review. That contains some more discussion of results and some more architectural information. Our news video about the 9070 series has even more architecture background than that.

AMD RX 9070 Overview & Specs

The RX 9070 has 56 Compute Units, with the 9070 XT running 64 CUs. Both are 16 GB cards with GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus. The GPUs have slightly different clocks. Both GPUs get the architectural overhauls of RDNA 4 and there’s no difference there, so the same ray tracing changes apply to the 9070 as the XT. The only real main difference is the move to 56 CUs.

And that’s sort of it. 

We’ll save the pricing recap for post-launch -- we want to monitor launch for the next day or two to get an idea of availability of both the 5070 and 9070 series, plus the pricing they land at.

Let’s just get straight into the data.

RX 9070 Game Benchmarks

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Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up first and at 4K initially.

In this test, the RX 9070 non-XT ran at 64 FPS AVG, with lows at 54 and 53. The 9070 XT’s 70 FPS result positions it 9% ahead, which is exactly how much higher the base MSRP is.

Against the equivalently priced RTX 5070, this is one of AMD’s stronger titles: The 9070 Pulse leads the 5070 FE’s 56 FPS AVG by 14% here, with 1% and 0.1% lows improved in-step with the average. The 9070 is achieving 87% of the performance of the 5070 Ti, but at 73% of the base MSRP.

The RX 9070 leads the RX 7800 XT (watch our review) by 37% here as well. We’ll look at the 6700 XT elsewhere.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RX 9070 ran at 106 FPS AVG, with the 9070 XT leading it at 116 FPS (or 9.3%). The 5070 Ti is only a few FPS higher than the 9070 XT, with the 4080 Super (read our review) just beyond that. In short, the 9070 is achieving 88% of the 4080 Super’s performance, which was a $1,000 card, but at 55% of the original MSRP. Despite our wishes that the 9070 were $50 cheaper, this at least helps to slowly reset the runaway pricing that NVIDIA set in motion. This gives everyone some perspective.

For some comparisons against prior generations: The 9070 improves on the 67 FPS result of the 7700 XT (watch our review) by 59%, the 53 FPS result of the 6700 XT by 100%, and the 42 FPS of the 6600 XT by 152%.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

Here’s 1080p. The old GTX 1060 and 1070 also appear on this chart to give some insight into upgrades, though anything modern would be better. There’s no point getting into percentages for those: They go from unplayable to playable.

The RX 9070 is about tied with the RX 7900 XT. The 9070 XT still leads by around 8%, with the 5070 Ti (read our review) ahead of the 9070 by 13%. The 9070 leads the RTX 5070 DOA edition by 6%. The lead over the 6700 XT is 96%, with the improvement on the 6600 non-XT’s 49 FPS result at 173%.

FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is up now. We included this same disclaimer and disclosure in our RX 9070 XT review, but to recap: We’ve noticed lower performance for the 9070 series specifically in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, including lower results than AMD’s own claims. We’ve had highly reliable results in this benchmark and our RX 9070 series data has been repeatable across multiple retests, so we’re publishing it, but we just want to highlight that there is disproportionately low performance for the 9070s and that it is something we’re investigating. It’s possible it could be the specific scene, benchmark version, or just the architecture’s behavior here. But the results are repeatable, so we’re running them.

At 4K, the RX 9070 continues the scaling pattern set by the 9070 XT. The XT is again 9% ahead. 

The 5070 FE leads both of the cards in this test, running at 78 FPS AVG and improving upon the 9070’s result of 63 FPS by 24%. Against the prior generation, the 9070 XT sees a smaller improvement on the 6700 XT of 53%. 

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 ran at 126 FPS AVG. The 9070 XT is 10% ahead here, with the 5070 ahead by 21%. Improvement over last generation is non-existent, with the 7800 XT right next to the 9070.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up next, tested at 4K first.

The 9070 ran at 91 FPS AVG here, creating a 13% lead for the 9070 XT and its 103 FPS result. The 9070 XT was excitingly right next to the 4080 Super’s 105 FPS in this game, meaning that the same $1,000 4080 Super result leads the $550 MSRP 9070 by only 16%. That’s a paltry gain for such a huge price difference, especially given how new the 4080 Super is.

AMD’s 9070 exceeds the performance of the same-MSRP RTX 5070’s 78 FPS by 16%. If NVIDIA would stop remaking 4070 Supers (read our review) and 4080s, they might actually make some progress here.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RX 9070 ran at 172 FPS AVG and outperformed the 3090 Ti. 

The 9070 XT outperforms the 9070 by 13%, with the 5070 Ti only slightly beyond that result.

Against the 5070’s 152 FPS AVG, the 9070 runs 13% ahead. The 5070 really does look even more DOA than previously in some of these tests. If it were a dead horse, it’d be getting kicked right now.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

1080p is up now. The 9070 ran at 247 FPS AVG here, which had it between the 4070 Ti (watch our review) and 4070 Ti Super. The 5070 still trails, now giving the 9070 a lead of 10%.

The XT model maintains about a 12% advantage over the non-XT.

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is a much more challenging title for AMD to run, but mostly with ray tracing. Either way, there should be some more favor for NVIDIA here. Even without RT, it’s a heavy game. The ray tracing tests will come later.

At 4K and rasterized, the RX 9070 ran at 41 FPS AVG against the 9070 XT’s 46, giving the latter a lead of 11%. The 7900 XTX sits ahead of the 9070 XT. The 9070 ends up still leading the RTX 5070, albeit on a technicality, which is actually a huge victory for AMD in this particular title. That’ll change with RT, but this is a good position overall in raster.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, the RX 9070 held 75 FPS AVG with well-paced lows, sitting at 65 and 60 FPS for 1% and 0.1%. This is consistent (and good) frametime pacing, but it’s about the same as all of its neighbors, so nothing exceptional.

The 5070 ran at 72.1 FPS AVG. The difference between the two cards is imperceptible and shows up in measurements, but would not be noticeable to an end user. 

The 9070 XT’s 83 FPS result has it again about 11% ahead of the 9070, so that’s pretty predictable now.

To just highlight some landmarks: The 2060 ran at 25 FPS and tied the RX 6600, the 6600 XT ran at 29 FPS AVG, and the 3060 ran at 31 FPS AVG.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070’s 104 FPS AVG allowed it to finally start gaining some distance on the 5070. It’s not a meaningful swing at 6% improved, but is in favor of the 9070. If AMD were $50 cheaper, it’d be a clear victory. Unfortunately for AMD, a tie will often be decided in NVIDIA’s favor by most buyers, especially with the complications of RT and software suites. But still, beating the 5070 in this game is an achievement for the 9070.

Starfield - 4K

Starfield is up now, tested at 4K. In this one, the RX 9070 ran at 63 FPS AVG and roughly tied the RTX 4070 Ti Super. The 9070 outperforms the RTX 5070’s 54 FPS AVG by 17%, which is starting to be wide enough that NVIDIA needs to be concerned…if they basically weren’t a monopoly. The 5070 Ti falls below the 9070 XT in this one and only leads the non-XT by about 6 FPS. Hardly enough to spend $200 more for. The proximity to the 4080 (watch our review) and 4080 Super also isn’t great news for NVIDIA.

Starfield - 1440p

At 1440p, the RX 9070 ran at 96 FPS AVG and nearly tied the 4070 Ti Super again. The 5070 Ti outperforms the 9070 by a lame 5.4%, with the 9070 XT outperforming the 9070 by 10%. 

Against the 5070’s 83 FPS AVG, the 9070 leads by 15%. If the 5070 weren’t already in the grave, we’d pronounce its impending demise. We might want the 9070 to be a bit cheaper just to see that balance for the times it loses or is tied, but even without that, we can’t deny that AMD is putting up its best fight against NVIDIA in years.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070 runs at 118 FPS AVG. The relative rank hasn’t moved much. It leads the RTX 5070 by 14% here, so the lead has slightly reduced, but it’s still ahead. The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by 8%.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

In Dying Light 2 at 4K, the RX 9070 ran at 56 FPS AVG and kept lows remarkably close by, at 50 and 41 -- but not in any more remarkable way than all of its neighbors. This game is just consistent.

The 9070 ends up tied with the 5070. There is no difference between these two and, in these situations, NVIDIA will generally be viewed more favorably by a mainstream audience. That’s where the price would come in, or hopefully awareness of the other results.

The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by 11%, so you’d be paying 9% more at MSRP for about 11% more performance.

This is one of the games where the 5070 Ti pulled ahead of the 9070 XT in a noteworthy way, so we see some of that apply to the 9070 and 5070.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 runs at 106 FPS AVG and ties the 5070 again. They’re within error of each other. The 9070 XT outperforms the 9070 by 11%, with the 5070 Ti still ahead of the XT. Generationally, we’ll just briefly highlight the RX 6600 (watch our review), RTX 2060 (watch our review), and RTX 3060 (watch our review) as reference points to some of the most common GPUs of past generations. Those should give you an idea of the performance gains.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 4K

Cyberpunk is up now. This one has generally been tough for AMD in the past, but is harder for it with ray tracing. We’ll start with rasterized testing and at 4K.

The results are thus far positive: We already knew that the 9070 XT outmatched the 5070 Ti, but now the 9070 is nearly tying the RTX 4080. That’s just embarrassing for NVIDIA’s last-gen mid-range-posed-as-a-flagship GPU as compared to a $550 card. The 9070 technically outperforms the 7900 XT as well, though is basically tied, and the lead over the 5070 is 15% again. 

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 now falls slightly below the 7900 XT, so they’ve traded places as resolution came down, and the 5070 has also gotten closer. The 9070 is now about 11% ahead of the 5070 rather than 15% before. The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by 11% and the 5070 Ti slightly.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1080p

In Phantom Liberty at 1080p now, the 9070 landed at 148 FPS AVG, allowing the 7900 XT (watch our review) to maintain its slight lead. The improvement in the 9070 over the 5070 is now down to 7% from 15% at 4K originally. If we dropped it down to 360p, based on this trend, NVIDIA might actually pull ahead. Great. Just like they’ve wanted -- maybe that’s the push for DLSS.

RX 9070 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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Ray tracing is up. This is where AMD has invested heavy effort with its architecture but all of it has been to try and catch up. NVIDIA was so far ahead in some games that AMD won’t be able to catch them in all scenarios. The real question is how much closer do they get this time.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 4K

We’ll start with AMD’s worst case: Black Myth - Wukong, but now with ray tracing and at 4K with upscaling.

The 9070 ran at 26 FPS AVG here, so outdoing the 3070 Ti (watch our review) but below the 3080 (watch our review) from 2020. The 3080’s original MSRP was around $700, although that really only held for a week or two before COVID-era scalping went crazy.

The 9070 XT outdoes the 9070 by 14% here. This is too low of a framerate to be playable, but we do the test for relative scaling and percent scaling.

The RTX 5070 crushes the 9070 here, holding a 57% lead over the AMD GPU. The 5070 Ti’s scaling over the 9070 XT was better and nearly 80%, but 57% is still huge for the 5070 over the 9070. If you want to play Black Myth with ray tracing, like we said in the 9070 XT review, you basically only buy NVIDIA.

Lows are where NVIDIA will struggle the most for 5070 VRAM capacity. In this particular test, we aren’t hitting VRAM saturation; however, we have shown instances where the 5070 hits saturation with heavy workloads and higher resolutions, leading to heavy stutter like in the Cyberpunk RT 4K scenario.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1440p

At 1440p upscaled, the 9070 pushed 47 FPS. This gave the 9070 XT about a 6 FPS lead, nearly tied the 3080, and outperformed the 3070 Ti and 7900 XTX notably. The improvement over the 7900 XTX (watch our review) shows that AMD has actually executed on its RT performance uplifts.

But unfortunately for AMD, the 5070 remains superior with a 73 FPS AVG. It leads the 9070 by 55%.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070 measured at 67 FPS AVG and pushed past the 3080. The 9070 XT leads by 9%. The 5070 leads the 9070 by 46%, so it’s slightly reduced, but still has an unbeatable lead.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 with ray tracing is next, tested at 4K first. We measured the 9070 at 56 FPS AVG, giving the 9070 XT a lead of 9%. The 4080 isn’t much past that, so for as close as these cards are, they’re also very close to the 4080 and 4080 Super. The 5070 trails in this one, giving the 9070 a lead of 15%.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 gets dangerously close to NVIDIA’s 5070 Ti, which failed to pass the 9070 XT in the previous review. The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 by 9%, the same lead as the 9070 XT has against it. The 5070 non-Ti is down at 83 FPS AVG, creating a 13% lead for the 9070.

This chart has entries for the 6700 XT (watch our review) and other prior GPUs.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070 ran at 119 FPS AVG and led the 7900 XT by a few frames per second. The lead over the 5070’s 107 FPS AVG was 11%. The 9070 XT has a reduced lead over the non-XT at this resolution, now just 6% ahead of the cheaper card.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 4K

Dying Light 2 with upscaling at 4K is up now, this time with ray tracing. The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by a higher-than-average lead of 16% here. The 9070 ends up below the 5070 in this one also, with the 5070 producing a lead of 9% over AMD’s most relevant card. 

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 runs at 78 FPS AVG and gives the 9070 XT a lead of about 10-11 FPS. The 9070 XT’s prior 16% lead is now reduced to 14%. The 5070 is also reduced to a 4% lead from a 9% lead at 4K. The 9070 was really struggling with the 4K resolution.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1080p

Finally for this game, 1080p puts the 5070 at just 1 FPS ahead now, so basically margin of error. The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by 13%.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 4K

In Resident Evil 4 with ray tracing and at 4K upscaled, the 9070 held a 104 FPS AVG and outperformed the 4070 Ti Super and 5070. The boost over the 5070 is 14% here. The 9070 XT ran 12% higher framerate than the non-XT, with the 5070 Ti basically tied with that.

This chart has a lot of cards lower down the stack, like the 2060 (watch our review), 3060 (watch our review), 2070 (watch our review), and 6700 XT for past generation comparisons.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 1440p

At 1440p upscaled, the 9070 ran at 162 FPS AVG and roughly tied the prior 7900 XT. The 9070 XT was 11% ahead of the non-XT here, with the non-XT ahead of the 5070 by 9%.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Ultra

Cyberpunk is up now, one of the two heavier titles we test for RT. We test this one at two groups of settings: Ultra and Medium, chosen because NVIDIA gains a disproportionate advantage at Ultra, while Medium pushes them closer together. That gives us the full picture.

At 4K and RT Ultra just to stress test it for relative scaling, the RX 9070 ran at 18 FPS AVG. Obviously this is unplayable, but this makes the point we made in our 5070 review: The 0.1% lows suffer on the 5070 in a big way. That’s because they’re indicating to us that underneath those lows, which really are just meant to be an indicator of a problem, there’s spiky and erratic frametime performance. This is caused by exceeding VRAM limitations on the 5070, which simply isn’t equipped enough to deal with these problems.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Medium

At 4K Medium, the 9070 boosted up to 24 FPS. No change in how playable it is, but even this lighter-weight workload is too much for the 5070 FE’s capacity, which you can again see in its lows.

The 9070 XT leads the 9070 by 15% here, one of the higher percent increases.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 1080p RT Ultra

Reducing the resolution helps reach playable framerates. At 1080p and RT Ultra, the 9070 held 61 FPS AVG against the 9070 XT’s 71. That’s a relatively large advantage of 16% for the 9070 XT.

The RTX 5070 ran at 64 FPS here, outdoing the 9070 by just 5.7%.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 1080p RT Medium

Finally for games, the Cyberpunk 1080p/Medium results put the 9070 at 81 FPS AVG, roughly tying the 7900 XTX. This also puts it above the 3080. The 5070 ran at 81.9 FPS AVG and lows were within error of the 9070. There is no distinct advantage in lows for the 9070 here. Average is the same, which is a major positive for AMD when considering its previous RT deficit.

Power Efficiency Testing

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

We’re moving on to power and efficiency testing now, which looks at both the total power consumption of the device during the test and the frame rate. The end result is that we can calculate the efficiency in performance per Watt. It’s actually a really exciting test for the 9070. 

In F1 24 at 4K and with RT, AMD has exceptional performance. These are only showing two decimals, but more are processed for the bar width. The 9070 roughly tied with the 4080 Super and 5090 FE (beware of scalped prices) as the most efficient GPU in our test suite.

The 5070 was at 0.17 FPS/W, giving the 9070 an advantage of 24%. That’s a huge swing in its favor. The 9070 XT was closer to the 5070.

Efficiency: F1 24 1080p

At 1080p but with the same settings and game, the 9070 again ends up just behind first place. It’s tied with the 5070 Ti and just behind the 0.64 result of the 5080 (read our review). The 9070 XT burns more power and, although its performance is better, the tradeoff favors the 9070 here. The 5070 ends up way down the ranks, at 0.55 here.

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 4K is up next. This is one of AMD’s weaker showings given its limited performance scaling in Final Fantasy 14.

The 9070 pulled 224W during this test when measured at the PCIe cables and the slot. The 5070 pulled 10W more, but had better efficiency from its higher performance. The end result is that the 9070 outdid the 7900 XT for efficiency, but gave the 5070 a lead of about 18%. For reference, the 9070 XT pulled 310W here, roughly matching their TDPs.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 ranked at 0.56 FPS/W with a 224W draw. That has the 4060 as more efficient, the B570 slightly less efficient, and the 7900 XT also slightly less efficient. The NVIDIA 5070’s 0.65 FPS/W result outdoes the 9070 again here, but we’ll see if that persists outside of AMD’s weakest rasterization title.

Efficiency: Dragon’s Dogma 2 RT 1440p

Dragon’s Dogma 2 with RT shows exceptional efficiency for the RX 9070, at 224W again and 0.42 FPS/W, it’s looking pretty good overall. The performance is slightly lower than that of the 9070 XT, but the reduction in power really puts it in a better spot on the efficiency curve. It seems like this is more of the so-called “sweet spot” for power to performance. The 5070 is down at 0.36 FPS/W, despite pulling 231W.

Efficiency: Starfield 1440p

In Starfield at 1440p, the 9070 is less impressive than in F1 and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but still overall good. Its result was 0.43 FPS/W, a large improvement on the 9070 XT’s 0.34. The 9070 ties the RTX 5070, which is a problem for NVIDIA because efficiency was one of NVIDIA’s main benefits with the 5070 Ti against the 9070 XT so if AMD is starting to chip that away, that’s bad news for NVIDIA. That’s kind of one of the key things the company has stood upon for being more expensive in the past. 

AMD RX 9070 Conclusion

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First, the 9070 gets credit for being relatively power efficient. It’s basically tied at the top in a few of our charts, though not all of them, but it’s looking better there. In our 9070 XT review, we said that AMD’s decision to favor performance over cutting power was the right move for the company right now. We think that remains true for the card that’s supposed to be its flagship, but for the 9070, the power cut helps create the difference between the cards to begin with, but the baseline performance is high enough that it ends up in a great efficiency position.

The 9070 XT ends up ahead of the 9070 by about 9-12% in most of the games we tested, with the 5070 generally giving the 9070 a lead in several games. Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 4K was playable on both, but the 9070 had about a 14% advantage over the 5070. The 9070 also led the 5070 by about 15% in Cyberpunk rasterized at 4K, with the 9070 XT ahead of the 9070 by 12%. There remains the one break-out for the 5070 in Final Fantasy, something we talked about in our 9070 XT review, but beyond that, for rasterization, the 9070 is ahead in basically every scenario.

Baldur’s Gate 3 even showed a large benefit at 4K for the 9070 versus the 5070 since we’re far enough away from the CPU bottleneck.

In ray tracing at 4K, the 9070 XT ended up around 9% to 19% higher framerate than the 9070, though that 19% number is based on low framerate, but even still, 17 is the next highest percentage. 1440p and 1080p weren’t that different and can be found in the charts section earlier. As for the 5070 in RT and 4K, the 9070 beat it by 15% in Dragon’s Dogma 2, 8% in F1 24, 6-7% in Cyberpunk, and 14% in Resident Evil 4. The 9070 lost in Black Myth and Dying Light 2 with RT. At 1440p and RT, the same losses exist. This points non XT and XT in a similar position to what we saw with the 7800 XT and the 7700 XT or the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. The gap is small enough that most people will upsell themselves to the XT model. 
Weirdly, NVIDIA’s own fumbles have sort of made the proximity of the two cards less of a problem than they otherwise might have been. Because from AMD’s perspective, it’s either AMD or AMD. They probably don’t really care that much which version you buy, but the XT makes more sense than a 5070 does. The 5070 is already mostly irrelevant. NVIDIA’s strengths like DLSS, ray reconstruction, and Reflex all remain, of course, but we don’t think the bells and whistles are good enough on the 5070 to outweigh the 9070 or the 9070 XT. The biggest strength it probably has is CUDA, which we personally leverage for things like video editing. But for gaming, the 9070 and 9070 XT have really kicked the 5070’s ass (though it really kicked its own ass).

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU Review & Benchmarks vs. 5070 Ti, 5070, 7900 XT (Sapphire Pulse)jimmy_thang March 6, 2025

We analyze the 9070 XT’s gaming performance, ray tracing, power consumption, and efficiency against many other video cards

The Highlights

• The 9070 XT uses AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture, has 64 CUs, and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory
• While the 9070 XT has made a lot of gains in ray tracing, it still often falls behind NVIDIA’s cards
• AMD offers real competition against NVIDIA, particularly against the noticeably more expensive 5070 Ti
• Original MSRP: $600
• Release Date: March 6, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

There’s real competition now. The answer you’re here for is that the 9070 XT and 5070 Ti go back-and-forth a lot (depending on the game). 
At 4K and rasterized (without RT), the 9070 XT and 5070 Ti were within 6% of each other (on either side) in F1, Cyberpunk, Resident Evil 4, Starfield, Total War: Warhammer 3, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. At 1440p and 1080p, we saw similar results depending on the game. Sometimes the 9070 XT can close the gap a little bit if it’s behind; sometimes it’s able to pull ahead a little bit. It depends on the situation. Because the 5070 Ti (read our review) is basically an RTX 4080 in a lot of games, which is basically an RTX 4080 Super, that means the 9070 XT is often close to the 4080 Super (read our review) in these games as well.

Editor's note: This was originally published on March 5, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Mike Gaglione

Efficiency QC

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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In ray tracing, it’s all over the place. This is sort of the downside to the card. AMD has got some real strengths, but it’s also got some real downsides. The 9070 XT improves massively on AMD’s prior generation, but NVIDIA remains fiercely competitive still. AMD gets crushed in tests like Black Myth: Wukong with RT, but is actually competitive now in more mixed load RT games (AKA more medium-weight RT). 

NVIDIA’s biggest strengths remain in its feature set generally, ray tracing, and efficiency in particular. Its power consumption is pretty effective for what’s output. The features get difficult to measure. For example, do we measure MFG as multi-frame generation or as…multi-failure generation… 

That’s the fastest possible version of the recap. NVIDIA has had a busy 3 months destroying the hype it built for the 50 series. They’ve had ups and downs -- actually, it’s mostly been downs. Not that many, though. Just the 12VHPWR burning. And the paper launch. And the prices not being real, even from first-party partners. And the missing ROPs. And the missing ROPs on the card they didn’t initially disclose them on. And the lying on stage about the 5070 vs. the 4090. And, well, we’ll be here all day if we keep listing all of the issues.

Let’s just move on to the 9070 XT review.

AMD RX 9070 XT Overview & Specs

AMD’s RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch the day after this story goes up. We already posted a video going into the specs and architecture of the cards, but the quick recap is this:

AMD has made major changes architecturally for the RDNA 4 generation, which the 9070 XT uses. There are 2 cards: the 9070 and 9070 XT. There’s probably going to be another card later that's at the lower end. The basic specs of the cards today might feel familiar to the Vega era, though: The cards are divided by a 56 compute unit (CU) model and 64 CU model with today’s review focusing on the 64. No, not that one. We’ll also have the 9070 review up shortly.

For TDP, AMD markets them at 220W and 304W, with board partners having room to scale higher. We’ll test this in our review. AMD is using GDDR6 memory at 16GB capacity at 20 Gbps and on a 256-bit bus for both cards. The VRAM alone will be advantageous in heavier RT workloads, which is something we talked about in our 5070 review.

The architecture’s biggest overhaul that we’re aware of has been in ray tracing. AMD has doubled the ray intersection rate, moved to two RT accelerator blocks with a shared 128KB memory, moved to BVH8, and introduced oriented bounding boxes to reduce or eliminate false positives in ray-triangle and ray-box intersections. AMD also introduced a dedicated ray transform block to help with transformation. This is all stuff that AMD needs to improve upon because NVIDIA has successfully sort of manufactured a category it’s really good at, which is real-time ray tracing.

All of this helps with ray tracing performance, where AMD had fallen behind not only NVIDIA, but even Intel Arc in some situations last generation. 

AMD RX 9070 XT Pricing

For our review of the card built entirely on lies and bullshit, the RTX 5070, we showed that Newegg only had a single GPU model in stock, sold by Newegg, that wasn’t refurbished when searching from $450 to $650. It was the 7800 XT. 

This is madness.

There’s just nothing there. The 9070 XT and 9070 both should be within this range, but they are also likely to get scalped. What may help is that there are rumors of greater supply than the 50-series, and likewise, they may be less desirable by the AI-at-home segment than the upper-end 50-series cards, like the 5090. 

Because these reviews go up before the cards launch, we can’t know where the pricing will land. We do intend on following it up immediately though with a report on how the launch shook-out. 

Either way, we’d normally dedicate an entire section talking about all the various alternatives at the same price, but the reality is just that there aren’t any other than used cards. 

We’re trying to keep this one simple today, so let’s just get straight into the numbers.

AMD RX 9070 XT Game Benchmarks

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Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 4K is a remarkably strong showing for the RX 9070 XT. In this benchmark, the 9070 XT ran at 70 FPS AVG, landing it between the RTX 4080 (read our review) and RTX 3090 Ti. That means that even taking MSRP at face value for both cards, the $600 9070 XT is achieving 95% of the performance of the $750 RTX 5070 Ti Prime, but at 80% of its MSRP. We want to caution that this result doesn’t always happen -- sometimes a 9070 XT is worse than a 5070, so it depends on the game. But this is a great start.

The frametime pacing is also comparable, meaning that the frame-to-frame interval is not noticeably different to a human player.

The 9070 XT leads the 7900 XT by 14.8% here. The lead over the 5070 is 24%, at 70 FPS to 56 FPS.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RX 9070 XT nearly ties the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti, the latter of which only leads by 3%. It’s measurable, but you’d never notice this difference. The lows are also within variance. Because a 5070 Ti is basically an RTX 4080 V3 or V4, that means the 9070 XT is also punching close to RTX 4080 Super levels. The 4080 Super was a $1,000 MSRP card that replaced a clinically insane $1,200 MSRP card before it, giving us some perspective.

The last-gen flagship makes us wish AMD had something one step higher as well: The 7900 XTX still leads the new 9070 XT, holding an 8% advantage here.

Against the new RTX 5070, the 9070 XT leads by 21%. The 7900 GRE posts an even larger gap to the 9070 XT. As for owners on cards like the 2070 or 2070 Super here, this might be a good upgrade.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the RX 9070 XT maintained its relative positioning against the 5070 Ti. It’s now at 145 FPS AVG to the 151 result on the $750 MSRP NVIDIA model, available on sale for only $150 more. We’ve never seen an inverse sale where the price goes up…

The 7900 XT ran at 134 FPS average in this benchmark at 1080p, giving the 9070 XT an uplift of 8%. As for the 7900 XTX, it’s still technically ahead of the new flagship RDNA 4 card, but only by 8%.

FFXIV 4K

FFXIV is up now. A quick disclaimer: The results here appear to be outliers in our dataset. They are repeatable and we re-tested both cards multiple times, ultimately coming to the same data set. They are lower than AMD’s own findings; however, we’re not sure if AMD is using the Dawntrail test like we are, and it’s also possible that the test area is different (as we capture a specific scene). Regardless, we’ll continue looking into these and wanted to disclaim that they are outliers from the rest of the rasterized data set, but the results did repeat in our testing. 

At 4K, the 9070 XT landed at 68 FPS AVG. Unfortunately for AMD, that means that the 9070 XT is worse than the RTX 5070 here. The 5070 leads the 9070 XT by 13.6% with its 78 FPS AVG; the 5070 Ti leads by a staggering 43%, at 97 FPS to 68. Whereas Dragon’s Dogma 2 was a strong position for AMD, it’s weak in this game. It all depends on the game itself.

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT ended up only 2 FPS above the 7900 GRE (read our review). Architecturally, the improvements just aren’t helping it here. The 5070 Ti ends up at 187 FPS AVG, leading the 9070 XT by 34%. The 5070 leads it by 10%. 

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Let’s show how much of a tennis match this really is.

Resident Evil 4 swings it back the other way: At 4K, the RX 9070 XT now holds a 103 FPS AVG, landing it nearly tied with the RTX 4080 Super. That’s a great spot for AMD’s card, which it needs after that Final Fantasy showing we just saw.

The 9070 XT leads the 7900 XT marginally and leads the 5070 by 31%. The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 3.5%, with the 7900 XTX (read our review) 23% ahead.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT continues to rank alongside NVIDIA: The 9070 XT is about 5 FPS short of the 5070 Ti, making for a measurable but undetectable difference to a human; that is, assuming the 5070 Ti has all the ROPs. If it doesn’t, we’d see anywhere from 6-12% more of a performance swing. 

The RTX 4080 Super leads the 9070 XT by 5% here. The 7900 XTX was also once a $1,000 card and itself leads the 9070 XT by 20% with its 232 FPS result.

Against the new RTX 5070, the 9070 XT holds a 27% advantage.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

At 1080p, the RX 9070 XT clocked higher framerate than the 7900 XT and landed just below the 5070 Ti. The 5080 leads the 9070 XT by 15%, which isn’t all that much when considering we’ve all been gaslit into thinking a 5080 takes the place of a 1080 Ti or something. 

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Since we just alternated to a title where the XT looked better, let’s bring it back maybe the other way.

Black Myth: Wukong tends to favor NVIDIA, both with and without RT enabled. We’ll see if that remains true on the new architecture.

At 4K, the 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 12% here. That’s not as big of a gap as it could be. Against the 5070, the 9070 XT is at least ahead by 14%. Compared to the prior generation, the 9070 XT is about the same as a 4070 Ti Super. The 7900 XTX is a few percent higher framerate than the 9070 XT.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT’s 83 FPS AVG result is matched with good pacing on the 1% and 0.1% lows. It’s not better than its neighbors in a meaningful way, but is keeping pace properly.

The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 5% and the 5080 (read our review) leads it by 17%, probably calling the 5080’s existence into question more than anything -- and again, that’s one with all the ROPs.

The 5070 ran at 72 FPS AVG, so the 9070 XT is about 10 FPS higher. That also had the 5070 above the 7900 XT, which the 9070 XT has now vaulted past.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

At 1080p, the scaling shifts the 9070 XT closer to the 7900 XTX. The two are functionally equal in all 3 metrics. The 5070 Ti outranks the 9070 XT on a technicality, but not in an observable way. 1080p seems to squish all of these together. 

Starfield - 4K

Starfield is up now. This one flips it again: At 4K, the 9070 XT leads the 5070 Ti by about 2 FPS. Just like we’ve said elsewhere, this is a measurable but irrelevant difference. You wouldn’t notice the 2 FPS. You probably would notice the cost difference, though.

The 9070 XT actually roughly equals the 4080 Super here and isn’t that distant from the 5080. Both the 5070 Ti and the 9070 XT are a threat to the 5080’s already questionable existence.

Starfield - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT is again between the 5070 Ti and 4080 Super, roughly tying the latter. The 7900 XTX has a 6% lead over the 9070 XT here. The 5070 non-Ti, which is still not equivalent to an RTX 4090, continues to not be equivalent to a 4090. Truly wondrous technology. We never could have predicted that…

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070 XT now holds a 127 FPS AVG with lows at 68 and 46. That plants it right between the 7900 XTX and 5070 Ti. There’s not much difference between these three in this test. The 4080 Super isn’t that different, either, and the 5090 (read our review) shows that we do have a little more CPU headroom.

So does the 4090, for that matter, which continues to not be a 5070.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

Dying Light 2 is up next. This is one of the heavier games in our test suite.

At 4K, the 9070 XT ran at 62 FPS AVG, which has it just ahead of the 3090 Ti. It’s also 11% ahead of the 5070. The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 12% in this test, which matches its gain in other tests where it held an advantage.

In other words, the 9070 XT achieves 89% of the performance at 80% of the listed MSRP. We’re reviewing this before the 9070 XTs go on sale, so we can’t know how much to adjust for street price yet.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 Ti beats the 9070 XT at 130 FPS to 118, or about a 10% uplift to the 5070 Ti. The 4080 Super is a few frames above that. The 5070 is down at 106 FPS AVG, resulting in an advantage for the 9070 XT of 11%. It’s equidistant between them.

AMD has also improved on its 7900 XT model. The 6700 XT is way down at 61 FPS AVG, so users on that tier of hardware could experience nearly a doubling in framerate in some tests.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 4K

We’ve been rerunning Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty on a newer version for all tests, so this chart is sparse.

The 9070 XT ran at 53 FPS AVG, giving it a lead over the 5070 Ti’s 50 FPS result of 5.8%. Against the 5070, the 9070 XT is ahead by 29%. Maybe more noteworthy is that the 9070 XT technically is ahead of the 4080. The 7900 XTX remains about 9% higher framerate than the 9070 XT.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT climbs to a playable 109 FPS AVG. This is without upscaling or frame generation -- just organic, farm fresh frames. The 9070 XT ends up basically tied with the 5070 Ti, slightly leading the 4080, and notably leading the 5070. We haven’t re-run AMD’s older stuff in this one yet.

AMD RX 9070 XT Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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Time for ray tracing. This is where AMD will really need to prove itself. AMD spent a lot of time talking about its improvements to ray tracing blocks in its recent press briefings, so they’re clearly aware of the deficit.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 4K

We’ll start with the worst-case scenario. Black Myth: Wukong has worked best on NVIDIA hardware since its launch, especially in ray tracing. At 4K with upscaling and ray traced, the 9070 XT ran, with our settings, at 29 FPS AVG. Playability doesn’t matter right now, just the relative scaling. We’ll get to lower resolutions down below.

With these settings, the RTX 5070 ends up ahead by a large 38% at 40 FPS to 29. The 5070 Ti is 78% ahead of the 9070 XT. This is AMD’s absolute worst-case scenario. Against last generation, AMD is posting large gains: The 9070 XT outperforms the 7900 XTX by 45%, climbing from 20 FPS to 29. That is a substantial gain, especially considering the XTX was often slightly ahead of the 9070 XT in raster but obviously, there are situations like this where you’ll have to just heavily weigh NVIDIA if RT and this type of game matters a lot to you. Against the 7900 XT, there was an enormous 84% uplift in performance. It’s undeniable that AMD is improving in RT.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1440p

At 1440p upscaled, the 9070 XT ran at about the levels of the RTX 3090. The 5070 now is 37% ahead, so about the same as the previous resolution, with the 5070 Ti 66% ahead, reduced from before. The gain in the 9070 XT over the 7900 XTX is 45%, so the same.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1080p

At 1080p upscaled, the 9070 XT held 73 FPS AVG and climbed past the 3090. It’s now approaching the 3090 Ti, which came out 3 years ago and had no formal MSRP at launch. It just sold for whatever in that period, which typically was close to $2,000, but occasionally $1,500.

The 5070 is now 33% ahead, down from 37% before. The 5070 Ti is down to 53% ahead -- still huge, but a gradual reduction from the 4K upscaled gains of 78%.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Let’s look at something more balanced. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game that we’d play with ray tracing enabled, as we do think it looks better, but it’s not nearly as heavy an implementation as Cyberpunk or Black Myth.

In Dragon’s Dogma 2 with ray tracing and at 4K, the RX 9070 XT ran at 61 FPS AVG.  This has it ahead of the RTX 5070’s 49 FPS result by 26%. The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT marginally and by 2 FPS, or 3.6%. The 7900 XTX is about 5 FPS ahead of the 9070 XT.

Definitely a healthier position than Black Myth, but also not as impressively heavy.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT ran at 103 FPS AVG and tied the 5070 Ti almost exactly. Again, this is heavier on raster than RT, but this is a better result than historically for AMD. Previously, the 7900 GRE was below the new 5070, with the 7900 XT about the same as a 4070 Ti Super (read our review).

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

1080p puts the 9070 XT as still right around the 5070 Ti and 4070 Ti Super.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 4K

Dying Light 2 is up next, tested at 4K with upscaling as the game is relatively heavy.

The 9070 XT landed at 46 FPS AVG, which puts it tied with the 7900 XTX and just behind the 3090 Ti. AMD still has a deficit in RT as compared to its NVIDIA competition, with the 5070 Ti leading by 24%. That’s not as obscene as the gap in Black Myth, but it’s still an undeniable victory for NVIDIA. The RTX 5070 ran at 44 FPS AVG here, so the 9070 XT is about 6% ahead. 

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 9070 XT ran at 89 FPS AVG and tied the 4070 Ti Super and 3090 Ti. It’s marginally ahead of the 7900 XTX, though they’re functionally equal. The RTX 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 16% now, down from 24% at the higher resolution. The 4080 Super and FE were tied with each other and aren’t distant from the 5070 Ti.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 9070 XT ran at 129 FPS AVG. The 5070 Ti maintains a lead here, but it’s now reduced to 9.4%. Those are some huge reductions in its advantage as the resolution comes down. NVIDIA is still ahead but has lost significant ground here.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up now. At 4K with ray tracing and upscaling, the 9070 XT performs at parity with the 5070 Ti. This is another of the lighter-weight RT titles, so broadly speaking, thus far, games with fewer RT features implemented that lean more heavily on raster allow AMD to compete better.

The 9070 XT leads the 5070 by 27%, with the 7900 XTX leading the 9070 XT in this one by 16%.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 1440p

At 1440p upscaled, the RX 9070 XT ran at 180 FPS AVG and allowed the 5070 Ti a marginal victory. The 9070 XT improved upon the 7900 XT, but not the 7900 XTX. 

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Ultra

Cyberpunk is up next. We’ll start with the heaviest workload and scale down from there.

4K and RT Ultra tends to destroy cards with lower VRAM capacity, like the 5070 with its 0.1% lows. Cards like the 2070 (watch our review) and 2070 Super (watch our review) have been removed this time since they were unplayable and their results were just noise anyway. One could be better than the other just because neither can play the game.

The 9070 XT landed at 22 FPS AVG. In a relative sense, what matters is the 5070 Ti’s lead of 23.5%. The 9070 XT leads the 5070 by 26% in average FPS, but the 5070 has massive stuttering problems due to insufficient VRAM as it depletes.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Medium

Bringing RT down to Medium but still at 4K, the 9070 XT runs at 28 FPS AVG and lands between the 7900 XTX and 4080. That’s a much better spot to be in. This puts the 5070 Ti ahead by 10%, down from 24% at Ultra. You could then get to a playable framerate with upscaling or by dropping resolution.

You can see NVIDIA getting embarrassed by its own choices again: The 4070 Ti (read our revisit) and 5070 are both crumbling in the 0.1% lows, which is a direct result of the low VRAM capacity. This low 0.1% value manifests as stuttery frame delivery and inconsistent frametime pacing.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 1080p RT Ultra

At 1080p but back to RT Ultra, the 9070 XT ran at 71 FPS AVG, 61 1% low, and 58 0.1% lows. The 5070 encroaches on this result at 64 FPS AVG, although the 9070 XT has a slight advantage in 0.1% lows.

The 5070 Ti leads the 9070 XT by 20%.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 1080p RT Medium

Finally for Cyberpunk, 1080p at RT Medium, the 9070 XT ran at 92 FPS AVG. That reduces the 5070 Ti’s lead back down to 12% from the 20% we saw with RT Ultra and the same resolution.

RX 9070 XT Power Efficiency Testing

We’re getting into efficiency testing now. Efficiency benchmarks are a combination of power consumption and performance, so you’ll get to see both in this testing. We perform the testing with a PMD2 sitting as an interposer between the PCIe slot and the power cables, capturing just GPU power consumption in isolation.

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

We’ll start with Final Fantasy 14 as usual; however, this won’t reflect well on the 9070 XT due to its overall low performance in this title. The 9070 XT ends up toward the bottom of this chart. Its power draw was 310W here, pulling less than the 430W of the 7900 XTX, but also producing a lower framerate. This drags down the efficiency, planting it between the XTX and the 3090 Ti. The 7900 XT was more efficient in this particular test, with the 5070 likewise significantly improved on the 9070 XT.

NVIDIA remains advantaged in efficiency.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

1440p has more cards on the chart. The 9070 XT ends up improved upon the efficiency of the 6600 XT and 6700 XT, up at 0.45 FPS/W, but still worse than the prior XTX, 7900 XT, and NVIDIA’s entire modern lineup. The 5070 Ti is 62% more efficient than the 9070 XT here, up at 0.73 FPS/W. This is not a good result for AMD. It’s burning a lot of power to produce the output.

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

Here’s a better test for the 9070 XT. In F1 24 at 4K and with ray tracing, the 9070 XT ran at 0.18 FPS/W. These results round to the second place, so differing bar sizes for the same numbers is normal -- it just means the hidden digits are separating them.

Anyway, the 9070 XT is more efficient than the 5070 and significantly more efficient than AMD’s prior 7900 XT. This massive uplift and flip over the prior raster Final Fantasy charts comes as a combination of improved performance for the power with the large ray tracing uplift that AMD saw generationally. NVIDIA’s 5070 Ti remains more efficient than the 9070 XT at 0.20 FPS/W, but this is much closer than it was previously and now only has an 11% uplift. That’s more normal.

Efficiency: F1 24 1080p

At 1080p but still in F1 24 with RT, the 9070 XT ran at 311W and scored 0.51 FPS/W. That puts it ahead of the RTX 4060, the Intel B580, and 42% improved on the prior 7900 XT. NVIDIA’s 5070 Ti maintains an advantage at 266W and 0.62 FPS/W, or a 22% improvement in FPS/W. That benefit mostly comes from its lower power draw to produce comparable performance.

Efficiency: Dragon’s Dogma 2 RT 1440p

Dragon’s Dogma 2 with RT and at 1440p is up now.

The 9070 XT consumed 311W during the course of this testing and calculated to a 0.33 FPS/W result, which makes it better than the 7900 XT and worse than the 5070 Ti. Despite AMD’s gains overall, NVIDIA retains its advantage in efficiency and output for the power used. AMD had to get performance before it could get efficiency though, as these two are part of the same formula. We think their focus should remain on pumping performance with the hope to balance-out the efficiency calculation on that side of the formula.

Efficiency: Starfield 1440p

Starfield at 1440p is up now. This is without ray tracing. The 9070 XT pulled 310W again here, landing at 0.34 FPS/W and just ahead of the B570 and 7800 XT. The 5070 and 5070 Ti are both more efficient, with the 5070 Ti in particular keeping a massive improvement at 0.48 FPS/W. The performance is comparable on the 9070 XT and the 5070 Ti here, meaning that most of that efficiency benefit comes from the NVIDIA card pulling just 209W to produce almost the same amount of work. This is a good comparison because they’re effectively iso work, or controlled for a nearly fixed output, and so we’ve eliminated the last variable of performance. NVIDIA is simply more effective per Watt consumed. Whether that matters is up to you. 

AMD RX 9070 XT Conclusion

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AMD is definitely winning in the cost per frame department -- but it has often done this, so now it’s a question of whether it wins by enough.

NVIDIA currently has 90% of the discrete GPU market share. AMD has 10% with Intel at around 0% still. That’s why it’s so important for consumers that AMD -- and one day Intel -- are able to really compete with NVIDIA. At the same time, AMD and Intel shouldn’t get pity purchases if they haven’t earned it. 

We’ll see how street prices shake-out for the 9070 XT. The 5070 Ti has a problem where its partners aren’t even hitting MSRP, so consumers are getting scalped by the likes of MSI. 

As a quick recap of performance:

In rasterization performance and at 4K, AMD's 9070 XT is commonly within the range of 5-6% of the 5070 Ti, with a few break-outs like Dying Light 2 and Black Myth non-RT where the 5070 Ti has a 12% advantage over the 9070 XT. As we said earlier, our Final Fantasy 14 results just don't match what AMD presented, but we also run the newest version of the benchmark. Across all resolutions, performance of the 9070 XT approaches levels of the 7900 XTX in some benchmarks and is commonly around 7900 XT levels, but often between them. Broadly speaking, the 9070 XT beats the 5070 non-Ti and these charts show the summary of some of the 4K and 1440p results we have against the 5070 Ti. These charts illustrate the percent improvement from a 9070 XT to a 5070 Ti. In other words, if the bar is positive and going to the right, then that’s a 5070 Ti victory. 

As for ray tracing performance, NVIDIA is ahead almost universally in our testing. In Black Myth, it's not even a competition. If you really wanted to play this game and you decided you needed RT for it with heavy settings, you'd basically need NVIDIA. In Cyberpunk, AMD narrows the gap from previous generations, but NVIDIA maintains a large advantage. In games like Dragon's Dogma 2 with RT, the 9070 XT looks much more competitive. The extra VRAM is useful in some heavy situations, such as in Cyberpunk RT with ultra settings where the 5070 starts to struggle under VRAM load.

In our efficiency testing, NVIDIA maintains an advantage overall. This is derived from both FPS and power, and in many of these cases, the lower power draw serves as the stronger part of NVIDIA's side of the equation (rather than performance). We think AMD's focus on performance before power is the right move. Power is OK for them. It can obviously be better, but running lower power wouldn't be worth losing potentially everywhere on performance. We think they made the right decision on this balancing act and can refine it later.

And this back-and-forth we’re describing is why it’s been so critical for AMD to get its pricing right. In situations where a purchasing decision between AMD and NVIDIA is unclear for the average consumer -- not most people reading this, but we’re talking about the mass market who don’t even know Gamers Nexus exists -- NVIDIA will remain the “default” choice in the minds of those consumers unless AMD really gives them a reason to pay attention to. For AMD to really get noticed, it has to either win in large ways or be much cheaper, but ideally both.

With the 9070 XT, we think the $600 MSRP is the minimum that AMD had to do to get some positive groundswell and attention. And it achieved that: there has been a lot of enthusiasm over the last few days, in no small part thanks to NVIDIA continually f***ing everything up. We wish AMD would have come in slightly cheaper on the 9070 XT to really kick in the doors to the mass market, even though that’d hurt short-term margin, just to make sure it can generate some momentum and keep developers integrating its own technologies.

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AMD RX 9070 & 9070 XT GPU Prices, Specs, & Release Datejimmy_thang February 28, 2025

We go over the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT’s price, specs, and AMD’s performance claims

The Highlights

• Both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT will have 16GB of VRAM
• AMD did not compare its new cards against NVIDIA’s 40 or 50-series GPUs
• The 9070 and 9070 XT will only be separated by $50
• Original MSRP: $550 (RX 9070), $600 (RX 9070 XT)
• Release Date: March 6, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

AMD's RX 9070 XT MSRP is $600, with the 9070 at $550. They are releasing on March 6th, which is a day after the RTX 5070 launches.

That’s a weirdly small $50 gap between these, but AMD isn’t a stranger to smothering one product with another. It did that with the 7900 XT and the 7900 XTX before. 

AMD today announced its RX 9070 series GPUs -- again. It announced them back in January, but then decided it didn’t want to announce them, so its announcement shriveled up and receded back whence it came. But now, AMD is proud to re-announce its announced RX 9070 series.

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 28, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Camera

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The RX 9070 is positioned to fight the RTX 5070, with the 9070 XT up against the 5070 Ti. AMD has decided to steal NVIDIA’s naming this time, growing tired of the naming scheme that brought us the R9 270, R7 370, RX 480 (watch our review), Fury, Fury X (watch our review), RX 580 (watch our review), Vega Frontier Edition (watch our review), Vega 56, Vega 64 (watch our revisit), back to RX 590 (watch our review), Radeon VII (watch our review), RX 5700 XT (watch our review), RX 6950 XT (watch our review), and RX 7900 XTX.

Maybe leaving the old names behind is for the best. We look forward to seeing what they do when they hit the dreaded “10.” Maybe AMD will be the first to bring us the 10,080 Ti…XT.

Overview

First up, the price: At $50 apart, it seems like these cards will smother each other. Until we can publish test data, we won’t know which one will cannibalize the other -- but it seems likely, as happened with the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX when they were about $100 apart at launch.

A quick pricing recap:

AMD’s RX 7800 XT is currently priced at around $500 to $530 depending on where or if you can get it. The RX 7900 GRE has been around $550 (though has been mostly out of stock lately). The RX 7900 XT is basically gone, but was around $630 to $640 at the end of last year and more commonly around $680. The 7900 XTX was as low as $800 to $820 in November and was commonly $930 in January. It launched at $1,000.

The 7900 XT received a review from us entitled “AMD’s Greedy Upsell” in December of 2022, knocking it for the $900 price point. We revisited it in October of 2023, so less than a year later, because you could get some models for $720. AMD dropped the price by 20% or so in less than a year. 

The 7900 XT became an awesome value after the price drops at least for a window there, especially in raster performance. 

We’ll talk more about the pricing once we have benchmark numbers in. That’ll include NVIDIA’s lineup.

With that context, let’s get into the specs of the 9070 and 9070 XT.

Specs

AMD provided this spec sheet for its RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. The RX 9070 will have 56 Compute Units, or CUs, against the 64 on the 9070 XT (a 14% increase in CUs). AMD has done splits like this before, like Vega 56 and 64, but the architecture has changed dramatically since then.

In a call with the press, AMD claimed that the reason it didn’t go up to something like 80 CUs is because it didn’t want to make something super expensive. That definitely would have been very expensive. It would have been a larger die so that is accurate that the costs would go up. We also think that the architecture might just struggle to compete with a 5090 at the cost they would need to hit to do so and that’s probably a large reason for this as well. AMD is focusing on the mid-range, where the architecture is perhaps better tuned to compete.

The hardware ray tracing accelerators match the CU count at 56 and 64, with AMD’s so-called “AI accelerators” at 112 and 128 units.

Boost clocks are significantly different between them: The 9070 XT is able to make more use of its extra 84W of power budget to hit an advertised boost of 2.97 GHz, with the RX 9070 non-XT at 2.52 GHz (the original slides said 2.54, but AMD brought that down before announcement). Memory capacity is identical between them at 16 GB. Both cards will utilize GDDR6 at 20 Gbps. Board power is advertised at 220W and 304W, hopefully with room for board partners to scale up with overclocking support. NVIDIA’s OC support has been relatively lackluster this generation, despite what the company claimed. Hopefully AMD can make it exciting. 

Finally, the cards technically are on PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, but we already showed that there’s no real impact to performance here in regards to the 5090. There almost certainly won’t be any impact with the 90 series either with the exception if they were to cut down the slot on a lower-end model or something, but for this, it won’t matter. DisplayPort is up to 2.1a and HDMI at 2.1b.

Block Diagram

Here’s the block diagram for the RDNA 4 die and architecture. AMD noted that this same die will be used for the 9070 and 9070 XT. The company says this will be 356.5mm^2, contain 53.9 billion transistors at most, and run on a 4nm process node. And then the 9070 would have some of the CUs basically turned off. AMD says that this is monolithic silicon and not a chiplet design.

This variation of the GPU has 4 Shader Engines, within each is contained 8 dual-compute units. L2 Cache is centralized and located towards the middle of the logical block, totaling 8MB max of L2, with 64MB of infinity cache at the outer edges and closer to the memory controllers. 

AMD’s big claim here is a renewed focus on ray tracing performance, where it says it has doubled ray intersection rates and improved ray traversal, alongside changes to how it’s handling bounding boxes for BVH probing. This is a big focus for AMD this generation and it is somewhere the company needs to focus because they’re pretty competitive in raster compared to NVIDIA a lot of the time, but there’s instances where they get completely crushed in ray tracing. 

Here’s a closer look internally. The area we’ll focus is on RT. Within what AMD calls the compute engine, AMD now has 2x ray accelerators to handle box and triangle intersections. AMD noted that the second intersection engine within the accelerator “doubles the performance for both ray-box and ray-triangle testing” over RDNA 3, although remember that this doesn’t mean a clean doubling in performance in an actual ray tracing game scenario. AMD noted that RT processing takes advantage of a 128KB shared memory block, also shown here.

This slide was dedicated to RT improvements specifically and highlights the addition of AMD’s dedicated ray transform block, which it says will “offload transformation as you transition from the top-level RT structure to the bottom level, where there may be many instances of a particular geometry.” Previously, shader instructions handled this task and, AMD says, added overhead to ray traversal which it claims to now have eliminated. 

The ray accelerators have the ray transform block and two intersection engines, which themselves required changes to BVH handling to be fully leveraged. 

AMD said it is moving to an 8-wide BVH solution from a 4-wide option on earlier hardware, which it couples with its new oriented bounding box approach that attempts to reduce wasted, empty space in bounding boxes by better conforming to the geometry in the scene, theoretically reducing false positives and also reducing performance overhead and loss during geometry intersection probing.

The slide claims that traversal performance improves by 10%. Again, this is not a literal 10% gain in the final framerate in an RT game, but is a building block in a series of others to contribute to AMD’s claimed uplift.

This slide above was pretty cool. The right side shows AMD’s register allocation, with the top-right showing RDNA 3 and the bottom-right showing RDNA 4. Between the two, there’s a change from static allocation in RDNA 3 to dynamic in RDNA 4. AMD highlights that RDNA 3 would reserve registers which may not be put to work, so it’d hold them in case they were needed, potentially not need them, and end up with inefficiency and unavailable resources. RDNA 4 is trying to resolve this. The bullets on the left make all of this pretty clear, stating that the improvement is in efficient utilization, largely because registers can be released or requested as needed.

AMD is claiming that its RDNA 4 CUs improve traversal by 2x over RDNA 3 when iso clock and bandwidth. The 3D block in the image is supposed to roughly illustrate where AMD thinks it’s finding most of its performance: It appears that the 2x intersectors and BVH8 change (from 4) are the largest contributions.

RDNA 4 also introduces more out-of-order queuing and aims to reduce latency of memory requests, which AMD claims further benefit RT performance. Further out of order execution allows work to complete even while longer latency requests are processing or queuing. AMD makes an example out of an uncached leaf node on the slide above, which would contain the lowest level of detail in an RT workload and could otherwise hold up a scene. 

First-Party Claims

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First-Party Claims: RX 9070

Let’s get into the first-party benchmark claims next. We won’t spend a ton of time on these since you’ll be able to find plenty of third-party reviews soon enough, but it will help set expectations for what AMD is targeting.

AMD’s quick reference slide shows a claimed 26% uplift against the RTX 3080 and 38% uplift against the 6800 XT. AMD didn’t show anything from NVIDIA’s 40 or 50 series here.

At 4K/Ultra and without upscaling, AMD is marketing the RX 9070 non-XT as an average of 21% improved over the RX 7900 GRE. The 7900 GRE was originally a $550 card. AMD is showing non-RT performance as improving up to 28% on baseline 100%, with the ray tracing performance showing a disproportionately favorable gain to the new architecture at up to 34%. This is good for AMD, as it was weakest in ray tracing historically. This disproportionate gain won’t wipe-out AMD’s deficit in something like Cyberpunk 2077 or possibly Black Myth: Wukong, but the key will be whether it can close the gap with better value.

At 1440p/Ultra and native, AMD claims the 9070 will be 20% faster on average, with the peak at 38% improved for ray tracing and 26% improved for raster. AMD observed a slightly larger improvement in RT at 1440p for F1, which is interesting, despite overall losses in scaling in raster. 4K diverging from 1440p isn’t abnormal, though. One thing we do want to call attention to and give AMD credit for here though is that they’re showing native performance. Even if they show FSR, that’s fine if they kept it locked to the same FSR options between their older and newer gen cards if they’re comparing their own products to each other; showing native is a better step than that. This is a massive improvement over what we’ve been complaining about NVIDIA doing, which was comparing its 50 series to its 40 series and enabling MFG 4X on the 50 series but not the 40 series and then just making it look like they are wildly better than they actually are. So we do want to call attention to and give AMD credit for making a more fair head-to-head comparison between its own products here rather than enabling some special multiplier on one and not the other.

First-Party Claims: RX 9070 XT

As for the RX 9070 XT, AMD compared it against its 6900 XT and NVIDIA’s RTX 3090, again lacking in any 40 or 50 series comparisons here. It claims a 51% uplift over the 6900 XT and 26% average uplift over the RTX 3090.

Against the same 7900 GRE, AMD claims an average uplift of 42%, or 66% in F1 24 with ray tracing at the high end. AMD claims it saw the same uplift in Cyberpunk with RT. In raster performance, the gains max-out at 48% over baseline.

At 1440p, AMD is seeing lower overall average uplift, with a slight uptick in F1 24 with ray tracing.

Conclusion

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We could run these percent scaling improvements against our own numbers to approximate where AMD would land since we have all the details we need here to calculate the expected performance. Launch is only a few days away though, and we’d rather test the cards than extrapolate on data that we have no control over or insight into. We’ll have third-party numbers in our own reviews soon enough.

Pricing is going to remain the key concern for these cards. AMD is doing some interesting things architecturally. We’ve covered a bit of that in this article. AMD has plenty of opportunities to have…ROPs and cables that…are not going to burn. The field is set for AMD to have a victory here. It is up to the company to execute on it. We just made a video called “AMD, Don’t Screw This Up” that talks primarily about the pricing, but the reason AMD has this amazing opportunity is because of NVIDIA’s screw-ups. 

Pricing is the key concern, but we’ll withhold judgment on it until we review it about a week from now.

From what we understand, it sounds like supply will be okay, but it’s hard to know what that really means.

AMD really needs to gain market share. According to Jon Peddie Research, AMD is close to the lowest they’ve ever been in the GPU market at around 10 percent while NVIDIA is down in terms of reputation and trust in their brand, so now is the time for AMD to strike. We’ll let you know if they execute on that soon.

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Do Not Buy: NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti GPU Absurdity (Benchmarks & Review)jimmy_thang February 21, 2025

We review the 5070 Ti’s value, gaming performance, ray tracing, efficiency, thermals, acoustics, and more

The Highlights

• The 5080 performs generally 9% to 16% better than the 5070 Ti
• The 5070 Ti is selling upwards of $1,000+ and performs similarly to a 4080
• We think you should not buy a 5070 Ti right now
• Original MSRP: $750
• Release Date: February 20, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

You should not buy the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti (beware of scalped prices), or really, probably not any of the high-end cards right now. The market is in chaos and conditions are at an all time low for consumers. It benefits this entire industry, including us, if everyone mindlessly consumes, but we’re telling you not to be a part of that cycle. This is not the time to buy an NVIDIA video card. The company says the 5070 Ti (beware of scalped prices) will be $750, but we don’t believe it. In fact, some partner models have already been spotted at $1,000, with plenty of others coming in at $850 to $900. We heard of one that’ll have an MSRP above $1,000. That’s more than a 4080 (watch our review), which is insane. 
NVIDIA calls it the RTX 5070 Ti, but it’s really more like an RTX 4080 (beware of scalped prices) V3 -- or V4 if you count the unlaunched 4070 Ti which was a 4080 12GB.

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 19, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Testing, Editing

Mike Gaglione

Testing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The TLDW up front is that the 5080 (beware of scalped prices) is about 12-16% ahead of the 5070 Ti in some of the 4K gaming scenarios we tested, the 5070 Ti is about 28-35% ahead of the 4070 Ti at 4K, but down in the 20-28% range commonly at 1440p. The lead of the 5070 Ti over the 4070 Ti Super, which is the closest recent price neighbor, is only 7.8% to 20% in a lot of 4K situations, or commonly 12-16%. One of the worst scenarios we saw was an impressively bad 3.9% uplift from the 4070 Ti Super to the 5070 Ti at 1440p.

You should not buy this video card. You shouldn’t even read this article. We’ll save you the time: NVIDIA has become fat and monopolistic and AMD has decided it won’t compete in the high-end, and Intel is not there yet, leaving everyone with a worse ecosystem.

The 5080 (beware of scalped prices) to the 4070 is a difference that has now been subdivided several times. Like the 4080 (beware of scalped prices) and 4070 Ti (watch our review), which was a 4080 12GB originally, already subdivided it. Likewise, the 4080 Super subdivided it further. The 4070 Ti Super (read our review) subdivided that again, and now, the 5070 Ti subdivides it once more.

There are so many subdivisions in this block that it’ll have an HOA by next week... 

In one of our tests, we saw an average gap between cards in this upper-end of 6.7 to 8 FPS card-to-card, depending which you want to count. That really means that the only relevant factor is price (except for maybe VRAM in the few places it diverges, where that’ll matter for professional users). But even VRAM has mostly been split into the 90-class and everything else.

The 5070 Ti is often the same performance as the 4080, which is the same as the 4080 Super. The improvement on the 4070 Ti Super, which was close to the same MSRP, is hardly meaningful. This aligns with NVIDIA’s launch strategy of either leveraging its monopolistic positioning or boring the ever-living f*** out of people with stagnated change. Meanwhile, it appears that AMD is sticking to its failed strategy of MSRP = NVIDIA - $50. Let’s get into the rest of the review.

RTX 5070 Ti Overview

We’re taking a look at the ASUS RTX 5070 Ti Prime model, which we assume is named like that because ASUS is trying to get Logan Paul’s attention. Or maybe it has electrolytes, which is what the gamers crave.

The RTX 5070 Ti has 8960 CUDA Cores, 16GB of GDDR7, and a 256-bit bus. The memory spec is identical to the RTX 5080 (read our review), with the 5080 having more CUDA cores but being a significant cut-down from the 5090 (read our review), which is more than what we’ve typically seen. 

We have the full specs in a separate article here. 

RTX 5070 Ti Pricing

Pricing is going to be the biggest problem for this GPU. Supply has been non-existent for the 5090 and 5080 and prices have skyrocketed into true FOMO targeting territory. We posted a video about the fake prices just a few days ago.

And in time for that, the 5070 Ti will launch with its own glut of pricing issues. We know one board partner has an actual MSRP north of $1,000 for one of its models. This gets worse considering the lower overall price of $750, which means that the proportional hike over expectation becomes untenable.

There’s really not a lot of ground to cover here that we didn’t in the intro, so let’s just get into the data.

RTX 5070 Ti Game Benchmarks

For the testing here, we had to remove a couple of cards from the charts to make space. Specifically, we removed the 3090 (watch our review) and 3090 Ti (watch our review). If you want the data for those cards, check our 5080 review as it has all that.  

FFXIV 4K

In Final Fantasy 14 at 4K, the RTX 5070 Ti landed at 97 FPS AVG with lows at 83 and 80. That’s the same as an RTX 4080 which, under normal conditions, might sound like a generational improvement on the arbitrarily named GPUs. Instead what we have is total generational stagnation because the 5070 Ti will regularly sell at prices, at least for now, approaching what the 4080 was. Even at only a slight elevation to $850, the card is simply too close to the last generation performance equivalent.

The 7900 XTX outperforms the 5070 Ti by 7.4%, with the 5080 16% ahead and the 5090 at 87% ahead. As for the 7900 XT Hellhound, which was the cheapest partner model for a while, that’s at 82 FPS.

Generationally by name, the 5070 Ti improves on the 4070 Ti by 34%, but the 4070 Ti Super is the more recent price replacement. The lead over the 4070 Ti Super is just 13%. That’s stagnation. We have the RTX 2070 Super (watch our review) in a future test, but the 1070 (watch our review) is here if you want something older. The improvement is 332% over Pascal, now 9 years old. 

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 Ti ran at 187 FPS AVG. 1% and 0.1% lows are where they should be based on other results, so there’s nothing exceptional here. The 5070 Ti outranks the 4070 Ti Super by just 15 FPS, or only 9%. Sadly, this is one of the better ones, but that’s still brutal and is one of the most boring improvements possible when considering the MSRP similarity -- and that’s before you go get ripped off for more.

As for other 70-class cards: The 5070 Ti’s uplift over the 4070 Ti is 24%, then 72% on the 3070 Ti (watch our review), 94% on the 3070 non-Ti (watch our review), and 307% on the 1070. The uplift has diminished for each of these as resolution came down to 1440p, despite the 5070 Ti not being anywhere close to a CPU ceiling.

AMD’s RX 7900 XTX (watch our review) leads the 5070 Ti by 13%, up from 7% at 4K. The 5070 Ti also leads the 7900 XT by just 9% here.

FFXIV 1080p

At 1080p, things get even worse. The 5070 Ti leads the 4070 Ti Super by only 6%, or just 15 FPS average. Over the 4070 Ti non-Super (watch our review), which remains an absurd distinction, we’re only seeing a 16% advantage on the 5070 Ti. No wonder NVIDIA wants everyone to type the framerate into a calculator and multiply it artificiality by MFG.

The new card is just 10% over the 7900 XT, then 74% over the 3070 Ti.

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is up now, tested at 4K. We’re removing the experimental chart labeling and feel that this test has had enough public visibility to clear that bar.

The 5070 Ti ran at the exact same framerate as the RTX 4080. NVIDIA has basically re-released the 4080, and the price isn’t even that different -- and in some cases, not different at all. In other words, NVIDIA has now released three RTX 4080s. This is the third one. At some point, it just seems like this is too much.

The 7900 XTX matches the 5070 Ti here. The difference is irrelevant and unnoticeable. 

Against the 4070 Ti Super’s 45 FPS AVG, the 5070 Ti leads by 13%, or 27% over the 4070 Ti non-Super and similarly over the 7900 XT. The lead over the 3070 Ti is 81%.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, the “RTX 4080 v3” ran at 87.2 FPS AVG, with lows at 74.9 and 70.3. The third iteration of the 4080 isn’t the best one, though: The first version of the 4080 and second version of the 4080 are within error of each other and technically ahead of v3. But on the v3, aka the 5070 Ti, NVIDIA has enabled Multi-Fiat Generation to make it more interesting, though.

The RX 7900 XTX is about the same as the 5070 Ti here, with the 4070 Ti Super just below it. The 5070 Ti is only 10% ahead of the 4070 Ti Super and 20% ahead of the 4070 Ti, with a similar lead over the 7900 XT. 

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

At 1080p, the 5070 Ti is again roughly tied with the 7900 XTX, although credit to NVIDIA for having improved 0.1% lows -- just not by an amount anyone would notice in play. The frametime pacing is still good on both.

The 4080 Super (read our review) and 4080 are again within error of each other and, although they’re outside of error vs. the 5070 Ti, the real error is the GPUs we launched along the way.

The 5070 Ti ends up leading the 105 FPS 4070 Ti Super result by a staggering, mind-blowing 9.7%, made only more impressive by the fact that this was already functionally the same as the 4070 Ti’s 100 FPS.

The 7900 XT (read our revisit) sits just below this.

Starfield - 4K

Starfield is up now. At 4K, The RTX 5070 Ti ran at 68 FPS AVG, this time allowing the RTX 4080 the important distinction of... being technically better.

The 5080 only leads the 5070 Ti by 12% here as well.

Troublingly for the 5070 Ti in this test, the 7900 XT nearly matches the RTX 5070 Ti, with the 7900 XTX ahead of it by 13%.

The 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Ti aren’t that different from each other in this one, either.

Starfield - 1440p

At 1440p, the 4080 Super and 4080 are exactly tied, with the 4080 Sub-Super, or as NVIDIA calls it, the “5070 Ti,” at 101 FPS AVG. 

The 5070 Ti ends up basically tied with the 7900 XT. The 7900 XTX holds an advantage at 11% ahead. The 5070 Ti’s improvement, if you can call it that, over the 4070 Ti Super is an impressively boring 3.9%, with the lead over the 4070 Ti at 11%. That’s impressive -- mostly because we’re impressed NVIDIA could make something so impressively stagnant.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, Starfield has the 5070 Ti below the XTX, which has a slight lead at 6%. More impressively, the 4070 Ti Super ran at 120 FPS AVG. Between the 5080, the 4080s, the 5070 Ti, and the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Ti, NVIDIA has managed to make a video card for seemingly every individual framerate between 110 FPS and 132 FPS. Why they’d do this, we have absolutely no idea.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up now. This one has the ASUS RTX 5070 Ti Electrolyte, which is what the games crave, at 73.6 FPS AVG. That’s right between the 4080 Super and 7900 XTX, making the 5070 Ti the first NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super-Super on the market. We won’t be impressed until they launch the triple-S-tier.

The 5080’s lead over the 5070 Ti is just 15%. That small of an uplift is going to weigh on NVIDIA.

The 5070 Ti leads the 4070 Ti Super by 18% and the 4070 Ti by 35%. The 7900 XT sits between the two 4070 Ti variants.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

1440p reduces the 5070 Ti’s relative ranking, pushing it below the 4080 and 4080 Super, the two of which are tied and within error of each other. The 4070 Ti Super’s 106 FPS AVG result also makes for a boring positioning of the 5070 Ti. Again, we’re back to a card for every couple FPS. More than ever, this means price matters more.

The 7900 XTX leads the 5070 Ti by about 6 FPS here.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the RTX 5070 Ti’s 151 FPS AVG basically ties it with the 7900 XTX, which itself is tied with the 4080 (which is tied with the 4080 Super, which is a waste of chart space and so isn’t shown).

Generationally, the 5070 Ti leads the 4070 Ti Super by 10% and 4070 Ti by 18%.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up now, first rasterized. The 4K test has the 5070 Ti at 107 FPS AVG, with the 5080 at 122 and leading by 15%. Both are behind the RX 7900 XTX at 126 FPS AVG.

The 5070 Ti is ahead of the 4070 Ti Super by 20% and 4070 Ti by 34%. The 7800 XT (watch our review) is between these and the regular 4070, followed by the older 3070 Ti at 53 FPS AVG.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5070 Ti is just below the 4080 FE. The 5080 leads the 5070 Ti by 13%. 

NVIDIA basically took what previously would have been a 51 FPS gap from 224 to 173 FPS between the 4070 Ti Super and 5080, then split the difference with the 5070 Ti. 

The 7900 XTX is ahead by 17%, with the XT just below the 5070 Ti.

NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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We’re moving to ray tracing testing now. We’ll start with Black Myth, which is heavily NVIDIA favored. Then we’ll look at some that are mixed or lighter workloads.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong 4K

At 4K with upscaling as defined in the chart header, the 5070 Ti ran at 52 FPS AVG and tied the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super. The 5080’s 59 FPS result had it 13% ahead. Over the 4070 Ti Super, we see a 15% lead for the 5070 Ti. AMD gets absolutely crushed in this test.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong 1080p

At 1080p and still ray traced, the RTX 5070 Ti ran at 112 FPS AVG and led the 4080. The 5080 is improved on the 5070 Ti by 9%. The proximity of cards from the 4070 through the 5080 is crazy, though: We have the 4070 at 80 FPS, then the Ti at 92, then the Ti Super at 95, then the 4080 at 106, then the 4080 Super which isn’t shown but the same, then 5070 Ti at 112, then the 5080 at 122 FPS.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 at 4K with ray tracing is next. 

In this one, the 7900 XTX is more competitive and lands at 66 FPS AVG, which is between the 5080 and 5070 Ti. It’s unfortunate that AMD gets crushed so hard in some of the other games, like Black Myth: Wukong because it does OK in the ones that are less crazy intensive. The 5070 Ti ends up basically tied with the 4080 Super, which is basically tied with the 4080. The jump over the 4070 Ti Super’s 54 FPS AVG is 18% here.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

1440p positions the 5070 Ti between the 4070 Ti Super and 4080. It’s not clear why this card needs to exist, but it does. The improvement against the 4070 Ti Super is just 10.8%. The 7900 XTX runs at 108 FPS AVG and is between the 4080s and the 5080. 

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 5070 Ti ran at 131 FPS AVG and was roughly tied with the 7900 XTX. The 4080 leads the 5070 Ti here by a few percent. The 5070 Ti leads the 4070 Ti Super by 9%, followed by the 7900 XT in the middle, then the 4070 Ti at 16%.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 4K

In Resident Evil 4 at 4K with ray tracing and upscaling, the RTX 5070 Ti ran at 118 FPS AVG and tied the 4080 and 4080 Super exactly. It’s within run-to-run variance and error. The 7900 XTX leads in this lightweight RT workload with a 14% advantage, posting a big difference from the heavier Cyberpunk and Black Myth workloads that we run.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 1440p

At 1440p with the same settings, we see a similar lineup. The 5070 Ti is again within error of the 4080 and 4080 Super, which are the same. The 7900 XTX is slightly improved. The 4070 Ti Super is slightly behind. This is uninteresting.

RTX 5070 Ti Efficiency Benchmarks

Efficiency remains a relatively new test for us to include in each review, so we haven’t re-run the 4070 cards for efficiency yet.

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

In Final Fantasy 14 at 4K, the 5070 Ti landed at 0.37 FPS/W. It pulled 264W in this test, approaching its TDP spec. The 5080 ends up slightly more efficient, with the 4080 Super equivalent. The 7900 XTX is at a large disadvantage here due to its power consumption.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

In Final Fantasy 14 at 1440p, the 5070 Ti ended up at 0.73 FPS/W, which has it just below the 4080 and 5080. The 5070 Ti improves on the 4060-class cards, but also is significantly more efficient than the 7900 XTX.

Efficiency: Black Myth: Wukong 1080p

In Black Myth Wukong at 1080p, we found the 5070 Ti to be between the 4080 Super and 5080 for efficiency. The 7900 XTX shows again that this is its weakness, but its particular performance deficiency in Black Myth in general is hurting it disproportionately.

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

In ray tracing performance with F1 24, we found the 5070 Ti to perform about the same as the 4080. The 7900 XTX scores significantly lower. Overall, here you’re seeing much lower numbers than in some of the other charts and that’s because this is a heavy ray tracing workload tested at a higher resolution.

RTX 5070 Ti DLSS4/MFG

All of this means that NVIDIA is basically just selling you an RTX 40 series card, maintaining elevated prices, and doing so while pushing DLSS4 and MFG as the only real differentiating factor on the 50-series cards. 

We already have a piece up talking about the new Transformer model versus the prior CNN model for DLSS, which you can check out for a deep dive. We also have a video with an image quality comparison, including a frame-by-fake-frame break-down of MFG, where we analyze the AI or synthetic frames against the keyframes, or the native frames. We do this at 2X and with MFG 4X.

The improvements in the Transformer model over the older CNN model for image quality are apparent; meanwhile, the generated frames serve their purpose of smoothing, but sometimes look bad. What they don’t do is turn a low frame rate like 20 FPS into something that is instantly playable. But as far as image quality, it’s highly situational; in some situations, DLSS ends up better than native because game developers have decided to ruin their games with terrible default options, which shouldn’t happen, but there are also a lot of scenarios where it looks awful. We also found bugs in the driver override features that NVIDIA has pushed to the public. This includes sometimes it incorrectly running the generated frames in the wrong places.

RTX 5070 Ti Thermals

This quick thermal chart at steady state during a looping 4K Port Royal workload and it shows the GPU and memory results. We don’t have other 5070 Ti cards to compare, so we can’t produce a like-for-like comparison. The 5080s are only here for reference.

The 5070 Ti came in 2 dBA quieter than the Zotac 5080 Solid (read our review) and was warmer while operating at a significantly lower reported board power during the test. The ASUS cooler is favoring noise here, but is also just not particularly effective. Overall, the performance is fine -- this is more than acceptable and well below throttle territory -- but this does seem to be one of the lower cost coolers for its size.

RTX 5070 Ti Acoustics

Acoustic testing is up next. We’ll keep this brief. As a quick positive, our chamber is about to get way better for future testing -- or more accurately, our microphone equipment. We’ve recently learned that with a microphone upgrade, we can bring down the noise floor closer to 5dBA, which is crazy exciting. Currently though, we’re on our more economical equipment.

With the current noise floor of 14-14.5 dBA, we measured the ASUS 5070 Ti Prime at 29.2 dBA with this frequency spectrum plot. We observed one spike at around 300 Hz. Otherwise, it follows what we have seen in other cards. The falloff begins at 2000 Hz, levels briefly at 3500 to 5000, then continues the path. The loudest range is 1000 Hz to 1800 Hz, aside from the 300 Hz spike.

These two added lines show the Zotac 5080 and NVIDIA 5090 FE (beware of scalped prices). The coolers should track about the same as long as the fan RPM is the same between the other 5080 and 5090 alternatives by the same vendor. The NVIDIA card had a spike around 180 Hz and another at around 380. The Zotac card had one in the 430 Hz range. Broadly, the NVIDIA FE is louder than both of these.

RTX 5070 Ti Conclusion 

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This will change in the future as prices move, hopefully, but for now, we don’t recommend buying this card. Honestly, it’s probably just a good idea to wait in general right now. But let’s just recap why that is as quickly as possible:

Broadly speaking, we found that the 5080 performs in the range of 9% to 16% better than the 5070 Ti, depending on the resolution and game. The 7900 XTX is often better than the 5070 Ti in rasterized testing, with the range in our games spanning equivalence to 17% at the high end, but more commonly 6% to 13%. There were some instances of regression for the 7900 XTX vs the 5070 Ti, but as has been the case, it only got really crushed in Black Myth or Cyberpunk-type ray tracing. The 5070 Ti only improves on the 4070 Ti Super by a range of 2.2% to 20%, often 12-16% if you’re looking at the heavier resolutions. That is not a good improvement for a generational jump and the actual street price we expect as compared to the 4070 Ti Super’s original street pricing, especially with the instances below 10% performance. It’s an awful value. Remember that the Super series was regularly in stock for its actual MSRP.

As we’re reviewing this, we can’t see the actual street price of the 5070 Ti in advance and we don’t review the future as we don’t know where the prices will land at launch, but based on what we’ve seen from the 5080 and 5090, our strongest recommendation right now is to just generally wait to buy a video card and let the market calm down.  

Finally, the 5070 Ti is equal to the 4080 Super. We don’t care what the 4080 MSRP was, because the 4080 Super effectively overwrote it. That was $1,000 and was actually available at around $950 to $1,050 for much of its recent life.

For AMD’s part, it really needs to not screw its new GPUs up. Typically, whatever AMD says its price is, it comes down in about 1 quarter, because they usually push it way too high. It’s really disappointing that AMD said it’s not going to be targeting high-end GPUs this generation. 

Overall, we think it’s not a good time to buy a GPU and wouldn’t recommend buying a 5070 Ti.

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Zotac RTX 5080 Solid Overclocking, Thermals, Noise, & Gaming vs. Founders Edition (Review)jimmy_thang February 17, 2025

We perform a tear down on Zotac’s RTX 5080 Solid video card and analyze its thermals, frequency, acoustics, gaming performance, overclocking, and more

The Highlights

• Zotac’s RTX 5080 is noticeably larger than the Founder’s Edition model, taking up over 3 slots
• The card costs roughly $270-$300 more than the Founder’s Edition model
• Zotac’s RTX 5080 Solid generally performs about 3-6% better than the 5080 FE
• Original MSRP: $1,270 (approximately)
• Release Date: January 30, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today we’re reviewing the Zotac RTX 5080 Solid. You should not buy it. At the time we wrote this, it’s being sold for $1,270 on Newegg, which is a ripoff for an RTX 5080. That’s 27% more than MSRP, and the 5080 was already a hard sell at $1,000. A 27% hike is horrendous value, and that’s about the start and end of our review. Thermally, the card is fine. Acoustically, it’s also fine. But the price is a ripoff.

Zotac has two main models of 5080: The Extreme Infinity and the Solid. We’re reviewing the Solid OC model, which has a boosted clock. The marketing is amusing for both the Solid and the Extreme Infinity

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 11, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Camera, Editing

Mike Gaglione

Camera, Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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“To gaming and beyond!” “Infinity Mirror,” “Spectra ARGB,” “Icestorm 3.0,” and “up to 9 composite heatpipes,” because that sounds better than explaining that the 5090 and 5080 are different. It even has a “card-length heatsink,” which is good because we’d rather have that than a backplate and fans extending past the heatsink... And yes, the PCB is shorter than the heatsink. 

Despite its price, we’re still going to test this card and see if it’s designed well, we’re going to tear it down and look for problems. We’ll test it thermally and acoustically as well. 

We’re borrowing the card from a system integrator because we don’t want to work with the partners directly for them these days and we haven’t been able to grab one when they go on sale. Supply appears to still be about 0. Let’s get into the testing of the Zotac 5080 Solid.

Overview

The last few Zotac cards we looked at had major oversights of design. The worst one had a huge heatsink that didn’t contact the MOSFETs. This card didn't have that issue. 

Zotac’s website says the “Solid” series is “no frills, all action.” We don’t know what that means. It’s a video card.

The card also has “a powerful cooling system” “*available on select models.” Good. We like the uncertainty of the product page specific to this product.

The site also says:

“With a stealthier aesthetic and engineered for durability and performance, the ZOTAC GAMING SOLID is for those who demand pure performance over anything else.”

As for actual features, it has an LED that alerts users of an improperly inserted 12V-2x6 connector, a dual VBIOS switch, a partial flow-through area on the back, and uses a massive heat sink. Unfortunately, the card uses a lot of plastic, including on the back and its design blocks some of the exhaust. 

Zotac RTX 5080 Solid Tear-Down

Zotac’s RTX 5080 Solid is much larger than the 5080 Founder’s Edition version (read our review), taking up over 3 slots. One nice thing about the card is that it uses a larger bracket, which helps with structural rigidity. 

The card uses a typical 3-fan design but has a somewhat large flow-through area on the back. Unfortunately, Zotac’s design blocks off roughly 20% of the card’s flow through here.

The card comes with a 3 8-pin adapter for the card’s 12V-2x6 connector. 

The card has a unique plastic “grill.”

The back is similar with some perforated holes, but underneath, you’ll see a lot of plastic obstructing airflow. 

Measuring the fans, they are 95mm ones and have a ring around the outside, which are supposed to help direct the airflow straight through a little more.  The first 2 fans are going to push air straight into the PCB in a more traditional way with the third fan pushing some of the air out the back. 

To remove the aluminum backplate, we simply remove several screws on the back, which expose approximately 2.5mm thick thermal pads that contact the backside of the memory and VRM. 

Next, we removed the card’s backplate by removing some screws.

To remove the front plate, we, again, removed some screws. 

Moving forward, we removed one cable on the back. 

From there, we removed the GPU’s leaf spring. 

Removing this section of the PCB exposes 2 connected fan connectors, which we need to disconnect to proceed further with the tear down. 

From here, we can see plastic around the GPU die, which is uncommon. We can also see that the card also has 2 additional 2mm clay-like thermal pads that cover the card’s inductors. 

The card also has 3 Zotac-branded fuses. From what we’ve heard a while back, these fuses won’t act fast enough to protect the card but does help the RMA center help identify where the failure happened.

Flipping the card over, we can see a vapor chamber. We also see the memory contacting a separate plate.

The GPU uses seven 6mm heat pipes, which is a lot.

The card has thermal pads that make contact with the MOSFETs, which Zotac had an issue with in the past.

We also noticed a thermal pad that touches the card’s R10 inductor.

The card’s fan cables are very accessible, which is good in case you have a fan die at some point. 

Cleaning off the thermal paste from the 5080 GPU, we can see the GB203-400-A1 die, which is a lot smaller than the 5090 die. 

Next, let’s move into our thermal testing. 

Zotac RTX 5080 Solid Tests

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Thermals - Equilibrium

We ran this prior to the tear-down in order to preserve the card as-is for testing. We tested both VBIOS options for thermals and frequency.

In a quick head-to-head, tested using the auto settings and whatever VBIOS tells the card’s fans and clocks to do, we landed on these results. The 5080 Founders Edition card ran at 32 dBA in our hemi-anechoic chamber and pulled 315W board power under this workload. Those variables put the GPU temperature at 65 degrees Celsius and memory at 72.8 degrees Celsius. The Zotac 5080 Solid tested with the same software and auto conditions ran at 31.1 dBA and 360W. The workload doesn’t pin these to TDP, but is consistent. 

The Zotac card runs a higher out-of-box power budget and its higher clocks are pulling more power. Even with the higher power draw and marginally lower noise levels, the Zotac 5080 card manages lower temperatures than the 5080 FE. Considering the enormity of the Zotac card, this is what we need to see. The 4-degree reduction in GPU and 7-8 degree reduction in memory thermals gives the Zotac Solid an advantage, although not in size, but the size is working in its favor.

Frequency

This chart shows the frequency over the test pass. The FE card plotted around 2650 to 2680 MHz on average, holding relatively stable under this test workload.

For reference, the 5090 has a lower and spikier clock. The configuration is much larger and the 5090 makes up for the difference in other ways.

Adding the Zotac 5080 solid to the chart, its clock is higher than the NVIDIA FE model, landing at 2790 to 2842 MHz. This is a pretty significant uplift. We’ll test that in some performance scenarios momentarily to see what it actually does.

Noise Frequency Spectrum

The next chart is produced using our hemi-anechoic chamber that we built with support from our Patreon backers and our supporters on store.gamersnexus.net, which allows us to isolate noise and ensure a like-for-like testing environment day-to-day.

This chart shows the 5090 Founders Edition and the Zotac 5080 Solid. The 5080 Founders Edition is mostly equivalent to the 5090 Founders Edition, with the exception that the fan curve runs slightly slower and so the noise is reduced by about 1 dBA in our workloads.

The Zotac Solid doesn’t encounter the same 180 Hz spike we saw in the 5090 and 5080 FE coolers, but does have its own spike around 433 Hz. The curve generally follows the same path, with marginally higher noise levels in the 1000 Hz to 1600 Hz range, but lower noise levels in most other places. The Zotac Solid overall manages to keep its noise levels down and avoids being obnoxious. It is making use of its size. 

VBIOS Comparison - Frequency

This is a quick VBIOS comparison for the Zotac 5080 Solid. Between the two VBIOS options, frequency is almost completely identical. There is no meaningful difference.

VBIOS Comparison - Thermals

For thermals, the silent VBIOS runs about 3-4 degrees warmer on the GPU from its reduced fan speeds. The fans run about 4-6 percentage points slower than the default VBIOS. The memory temperature climbs about 3 degrees. There’s not a big impact to thermals from the VBIOS change and the fans don’t really change a lot either.

Zotac RTX 5080 Solid Gaming Benchmarks

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

In Resident Evil 4 at 4K, the RTX 5080 Solid ran at 128 FPS AVG and led the 5080 FE by 4.2%. That’s not a bad uplift, but it’s bad for almost $300 more, though. Lows are within usual variance and benefitted similarly.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5080 Solid held 237 FPS AVG against the 5080 FE’s 224, which is a 6% lead. That’s a big jump within the same GPU model. Again, the price isn’t justified, but at least we’re seeing an impact from the pre-overclock by Zotac.

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K RT

In Black Myth: Wukong at 4K and ray traced with upscaling, we saw the RTX 5080 Solid at 60 FPS to the FE’s 58.6. That’s a 2.6% improvement over the FE model.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p RT

At 1080p and with RT with upscaling, the Solid ran at 128 FPS AVG to the FE’s 122. That’s a 5.5% improvement over the FE model.

Final Fantasy XIV - 4K

In Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail at 4K, we saw the 5080 Solid at 117.5 FPS to the FE’s 112.4, a 4.5% uplift. This trend repeated across the other games we tested. It is consistent, so we’ll stop here with the game benchmarks as it tells the same story. In short, it’s generally about 3-6% better.

Overclocking - Steel Nomad

Overclocking has some bugs on the 50-series right now. We haven’t dug too much into this bug, but it appears as if the voltage offset slider has an issue with the 50-series at present and reduces GPU clocks when used. We ended up setting it to 0 instead.

This quick table shows the overclock stepping with 3D Mark Steel Nomad. From stock, we were able to hold an offset of 700 MHz core, which is huge, without a memory offset, landing the result at 8160 points. The uplift from stock was an insane 28%. This was not replicated in real-world use cases so check your expectations. Adding memory clocks introduced instability without dropping the core offset to 650 so we did that.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to use the 700 MHz offset with the memory offset. We also were unable to find stability from these clocks in any gaming use case, so sadly, it was purely synthetic. This is mostly interesting from a competitive overclocking standpoint.

Overclocking - FFXIV 4K

The next testing was only done for a performance check. We did not burn this in for stability, so we want to really heavily emphasize that this overclock is not stable in all games we test. It was only stable in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail at 4K. You’d have to spend time tuning it down to dial it in, but we wanted to present what we found so far.

The stock 5080 FE ran at 112 FPS AVG. The 5080 Solid, out of the box, ran at 117.5 FPS without any background applications. We saw performance degradation when we began running Zotac’s utility in the background in addition to changing the clocks and fan speeds, so just increasing the power offset and applying up to a 200 MHz core offset resulted in performance equal to or worse than stock. We were able to run the Final Fantasy benchmark with stability up to a 500 MHz core offset and 1200 memory offset; however, we’re not certain if there are any invisible background issues with this memory offset especially out of this game.

The end result was a 125.7 FPS AVG, which led the stock Zotac Solid result of 117.5 FPS AVG by 7%. That’s not a bad uplift but it’s not that exciting. The lead over the FE model is almost 12%, which is more meaningful.

Overall, that’s a decent amount of OC headroom from the base FE result, while the 7% uplift is typical for recent generations. In no real-world case were we able to replicate the Steel Nomad uplift.

Overclock Frequency Results

Finally, here’s the frequency chart in Final Fantasy. This isn’t comparable to the earlier charts for frequency. Out of the box, the card ran at 2625 MHz. Memory ran at 1875 MHz, but keep in mind that there’s a multiplying effect for GDDR.

The core after a 500 MHz offset ran at 3120 MHz, which is almost 1-to-1. The memory after offset ran at 2025 MHz. This is about correct and what we’d expect after multiplying the numbers for GDDR effective speeds.

As an important note here, this type of testing mostly looks at the impact from the power percent slider offset. Broadly speaking, GPU variance from the “silicon lottery” has more total impact than any particular partner model outside of its power boosting headroom (and the super high-end models sometimes being binned, but this is rare on anything but flagships).

Zotac RTX 5080 Solid Conclusion

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The Zotac RTX 5080 Solid is built well overall. We didn’t see any massive red flags with this card except for its price. If you don’t care about that and you just want a 5080, this card is fine, again, except for its price. We didn’t have any major complaints with its thermals, assembly, or acoustics.  

The thermals, in particular, are a little bit better than the Founder’s Edition card, but not much better as they probably should be given the size of the card. The memory was improved a decent amount, however, being roughly 7 to 9 degrees cooler.

Performance is roughly 2-5% better out of the box than the Founder’s Edition card. 

In the past, we found Zotac’s MOSFETs weren’t contacting the thermal pads for the heatsink, but that, fortunately, wasn’t the case here. 

Overall, there was nothing hugely detrimental here aside from the value as $1,000 for a 5080 is already very questionable. It’s hard for us to compare the thermal performance when we only have this partner model. We haven’t been able to get any others yet, but that’s something we’d like to dive deeper into provided we can get more cards in.

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Cyberpower, Please Stop: 95°C 9800X3D Pre-Built Gaming PC Reviewjimmy_thang February 14, 2025

We evaluate the build’s thermals, build quality, CPU frequency, acoustics, setup, packaging, and more

The Highlights

• Cyberpower's build is equipped with a 9800X3D, 4070 Super, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM, and a 1,000-watt PSU
• The system has a horrible cooling solution that throttles the CPU by 200 MHz all-core
• Aside from the poor thermals, this pre-built PC is excellent
• Original MSRP: $1,865

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

Grab a GN Soldering & Project Mat for a high-quality work surface with extreme heat resistance. These purchases directly fund our operation, including our build-out of the hemi-anechoic chamber for our acoustic testing! (or consider a direct donation or a Patreon contribution!)

Intro

We really need Cyberpower to stop screwing up its thermal configuration. It’s been doing this for 10 years of GN buying and reviewing its PCs, and it’s disappointing because this pre-built is overall excellent. Its only failing is in the thermal configuration. Everything else was done with great attention to detail.
AMD still gets shafted by big OEMs and system integrators for its CPUs, which is why this system excited us. We’re reviewing a Cyberpower 9800X3D pre-built gaming PC that we bought undercover. It’s the first pre-built with a 9800X3D we’re reviewing, although Thermaltake’s Vista 470M did really well in our review and used a 7800X3D (watch our review).

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 6, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Vitalii Makhnovets

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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We bought this before the RTX 50 GPUs were announced, so especially considering that, the price was actually excellent at the time we bought it. Back then, it was about a $200 markup on the DIY cost. That’s one of the most competitive prices we’ve seen. So, some of the components are well-chosen, the price is competitive, and now it’s up to Cyberpower to build it properly.

Overview

Lately we’ve been looking for some actually good pre-built PCs and we’ve had mixed success. The Thermaltake Vista 470M was really good for a pre-built, but the small form factor ASUS G22CH-DH978 was actually the worst we’ve reviewed so far.

We jumped on this system from CyberpowerPC as a “Daily Deal” because it had a Ryzen 9800X3D with a good configuration on paper at what looked like a reasonable price at $1,865. Again, that’s before the 50-series was announced. It was also a rotating daily deal, which phased in and out.

Cyberpower’s MO is a little less about cringe marketing and more about absolutely flooding you with overwhelming configuration options while shopping. Just look at the insanity in the images above. Not even counting the multiple base SKUs and rotating options like this “Daily Deal,” once you get into customization, it’s completely overwhelming. Everything is “just $20 more” or “just another $10,” taking the car model of adding every small piece of trim and ending up paying 30% more at the end.

We really hope the web developers at Cyberpower get paid per radio button. The product page was so long that Firefox literally refused to screenshot the whole thing. Some of this is good – we like options – but this is the Cyberpower way.

In fact, Cyberpower’s upsell tactics here are so well-known that we know people outside the industry who refer to add-on flooding as “getting Cyberpowered.”

It’s not like it’s a bad practice, it’s just their business model. We didn’t add anything to our system as we think many people will just buy it as the company presented it.

There are a lot of good things about the PC on the surface: the on-paper part choice made sense, cable management is excellent, and general value is pretty damn good for a pre-built. But there’s at least one massive negative, and it’s the CPU thermals. We’ll come back to that below.

Pricing

CyberPowerPC 9800X3D Pre-built | Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

	Part Name	DIY Equivalent Part	DIY Part Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D	Identical	$480
CPU Cooler	CyberpowerPC Bitspower Infinity 240mm ARGB Liquid Cooler	Thermalright ARGB 240mm Liquid Cooler	$50
Motherboard	ASUS PRIME B650M-A AX II	Identical	$150
Memory	32GB (16GBx2) DDR5-6000	Identical	$80
Storage	2TB ADATA LEGEND 800 GOLD NVMe M.2 SSD (Gen4)	2TB ADATA Legend 800 NVMe M.2 SSD (Gen4)	$120
GPU	NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super	NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super	$610
Case	CyberpowerPC AMETHYST 360M	Montech X3 Mesh	$55
Power Supply	1000W 80 Plus Gold	Rosewill CMG1000G5	$120
Pre-built Price: $1865	DIY Total: $1665
Pre-built Premium Over DIY: $200

This table has the parts. Remember that we’re looking at this data from back when we bought it, not today, because we want to judge it against the time of purchase. That was around the last week of November. Pricing for the Cyberpower system is good to average, with a $200 premium over DIY for exact parts at the time. The wildly popular 9800X3D is still going in and out of stock, making it frequently above MSRP due to third-party opportunism. We’re showing it as $480 for the sake of this chart since it restocks frequently and can be bought for MSRP with patience and we don’t think you should pay a scalped price for it.

The Bitspower 240mm cooler and white-labeled Cyberpower case can’t be purchased retail from anywhere we saw, so we subbed those out with reasonable alternatives for DIY comparison.

32GB of DDR5-6000 is the right choice for this AM5 Ryzen gaming system, so that’s good to see. RAM is a common area that pre-builts screw-up since they underspec the speed, but this is good. The 2TB capacity on the SSD is also good. The ASUS Prime B650 motherboard is thankfully an off-the-shelf model with public drivers and BIOS, which means you can maintain it yourself.

The 1,000W PSU is overkill for this 9800X3D and 4070 Super (read our review) configuration, but at the very least keeps the door wide open for a future GPU upgrade to anything currently available – even to a used 4090 (watch our review) some time in the future.

Overall, the paper listing of the specs looks like reasonably chosen parts. There isn’t any proprietary BS in this list, which is great to see.

Tear-Down

Time to get into the tear down.

The case has a dust filter on the top of the exhaust. It’s not necessary and can impede airflow a little. We noticed the dust filter had a quality-control issue with it splitting apart at one end.

We also noticed a screw at the back of the case being screwed in at an angle.

There are things we like and don’t like regarding the case. We like how the front door has an indentation that allows you to easily push out the glass side panel, which we found to be a nice, simple mechanical feature.  

The front of the case is perforated, but the porosity is low. It’s definitely a lot better than what Cyberpower used to do, which was to use a glass wall. The LED bar, however, completely blocks airflow. As a matter of fact, there is a fan behind it, which does close to nothing as a result.  

The bottom of the case technically has holes, but there’s not much room for it to breathe between the dust filter and the case’s short feet. This probably chokes the intake of the power supply. On the positive side, the filter pulls out from the front, which prevents owners from having to move it from the wall to pull it from the back. 

The back fan is also an area with room for improvement as the case blocks off roughly 20% of the fan here. The design could have used more perforation to allow more breathability. 

Opening up the case, the cable management looks pretty good. The zip ties are also cut to look a little cleaner. We did notice a random twist tie that was on there, which wasn’t doing anything. That’s minor and we won’t take off any points for that. 

The PC also uses a cheap PCB for all of its RGB cables.

Internally, the RAM sticks are in the correct slots, which is good. The cables are fully seated. We can see that Cyberpower uses a Bitspower 240mm liquid cooler, which has been re-badged to feature a Cyberpower logo.  

Next, we wanted to remove the cooler to see what was causing the build’s thermal issues. Taking it off, we can confirm that everything was fully seated and that there were no loose screws. We did, however, notice a cable coiled around one of the screws, which may have caused some unlevelness.  

Examining the cooler’s coldplate, we noticed there wasn’t good contact between the cooler and the CPU via the paste pattern. It was uneven. It may have potentially been caused by the aforementioned cable wrapped around one of the cooler’s screws. Looking down at the CPU itself, the paste was not spread well, which may have caused poor performance. The cooler itself may be bad as we haven’t tested it standalone. A 240mm cooler should be enough here if it’s not trash, so it’s disappointing to see bad thermal performance here.   

Testing

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CPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed - Full Torture

Time to get into testing:

CPU cooling is the largest problem this system has, so we’ll start the charts with CPU thermals vs. fan speeds over time during our full system torture load.

Tdie jumps over 90C as soon as the test starts, then dips as the CPU fans ramp to try to keep it under control and as the GPU load prepares to run. The fan ramp comes with an acoustic cost. We can see that the AIO pump and front panel fan speeds don’t change at all, even as the CPU hits 95 degrees Celsius. The pump is fine since it’s maxed out, but the relatively low 1,200RPM on CPU_OPT isn’t ideal. It may be due to the specific fan choice topping out at that RPM, or due to some inherent behavior of the CPU_OPT header which isn’t directly controllable in BIOS. Either way, what’s clear is that this temperature is totally unacceptable. It’s unfortunate, as a lot of other aspects of the machine were good. This has been our historic experience with Cyberpower, though: The company just really seems to struggle with thermals.

As a reminder, the 9800X3D is not like the 7950X (watch our review) or early AM5 silicon. The CPU doesn’t boost to 95C. It just runs up against its power limit. The chip is remarkably easy to cool when considering its performance, and yet somehow, Cyberpower has failed to do that. We’ll talk more about what caused that failure in the conclusion.

CPU Frequency

CPU frequency is next. This shows the performance impact of running against the 9800X3D’s temperature limit like this.

The Cyberpower system’s CPU cores averaged out to 5,023MHz during the CPU-only portion of our test – that’s 200MHz lower than in our original review of the 9800X3D. This is a gigantic drop when considering it’s applied across all cores. This indicates that the CPU’s not able to consume enough power to keep clocks high due to the thermal constraints. It’s throttling. This is a huge disappointment for an otherwise promising system. A drop of 200MHz is massive when looking at an all-core load.

System Thermals - Full Torture

We next manually set the fans to 100% in BIOS, but even this wasn’t able to keep the CPU under 95C, partly because the fans were eventually ramping to 100% anyway. It may help boost slightly higher initially, but doesn’t resolve the throttling.

The rest of the system’s thermals also remained within variance between the two configurations. GPU, chipset, SPD hub (which is RAM), and drive temperatures were within expected ranges. The 67 degree GPU temperature is good.

Acoustics - Full Torture

Next up is testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber.

Acoustic testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber underscores the immediate fan ramp, as it instantly jumped from the idle average of 31.6dBA to 37.9dBA average under load. That’s louder than we’d like to hear at both ends of the spectrum, but is also a huge and instantaneous change and that’s the part that really matters here. There’s no gradual ramp. It just instantly dumps an extra 6 decibels of noise as soon as there’s a load, which is something an end user would notice. 

Subjective analysis of the noise profile doesn’t turn up any harsh tones, just the typical sound of loud fans. Here’s a sample.

Power - Full Torture

Power testing is next. It’s tested at the wall. This is mostly to determine if Cyberpower chose a large enough PSU.

Logging power at the wall shows a very flat steady-state with an average of 500W during our torture load of Blender on the CPU and 3DMark Port Royal on the GPU. This level of load is uncommon in gaming scenarios, as it heavily loads both core components at once. This puts the 1000W PSU at 50% capacity, leaving plenty of headroom and keeping the PSU in a good spot on its efficiency curve.

BIOS, OS Setup, and Software

Time to get into BIOS, operating system setup, and software or bloatware presence.

Booting into the BIOS showed version 3042 from October 22, 2024 – one version out of date when we purchased it at the very end of November. We look for the most up-to-date version at time of purchase, but within a month is overall good.

The EXPO memory profile was enabled, ASUS’ performance enhancement was disabled, and almost everything else was set to auto. Cyberpower has a clean BIOS setup that we agree with overall. The only change we’d like to see is disabling the Armory Crate bloatware installer, which is unfortunately a default setting. But EXPO and disabling ASUS’ enhancements are both correct.

Windows setup itself was normal and not appended with any third-party software agreements.

The desktop was clean and without bloatware – the only extra software at all was ASUS AURA RGB software, which technically adds functionality. The new NVIDIA App was preinstalled with driver version 566.36, which is actually from December 5. That’s awesome to see as it was the latest version before the PC shipped out the door. There were no missing drivers in Device Manager either. There also weren’t any stray files left behind. Having a driver from right when we purchased is awesome, so good job to Cyberpower.

Again, the software side of setup is solid for this system. This entire aspect of pre-builts has so many potential pitfalls that getting it all right like this deserves commendation.

Packaging

Packaging was fine, though the box showed typical shipping wear we see when not double-boxed, which is preferred. Cyberpower didn’t do that. The interior of the PC had a large pack of expanding foam protecting the GPU from impact. This is what we’d want to see, so another area where Cyberpower excelled.

Accessories

Accessories included with the CyberpowerPC system were better than average. The RGB keyboard (featuring volume roller) isn’t particularly good, but easily clears most of the garbage-tier peripherals we’re used to seeing with pre-builts.

The bag inside held a game pass promo card, quick start guide, USB stick card, and invoice as well as the usual motherboard pack-ins. The mouse, surprisingly, even has thumb buttons -- that alone gets the “It’s Better Than Dell” award.

The quick start guide is good. Step 1 guides the user to remove internal packing foam and to inspect for loose cables. Step 2 instructs the user to use the display connectors on the GPU instead of the motherboard, which is the most common mistake, and Step 4 takes care of the second-most common by showing turning the power switch as “on” at the PSU.

The strangest thing included is a USB drive embedded into a fold-out card. At first we thought this might be the usual thing and contain drivers and maybe a manual, but instead, it acted like malware. Plugging the USB drive into the system triggers a script that rapidly opens Run and types https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/share, launching the default browser to that address, and looking incredibly suspicious in the process. 

The page it takes you to isn’t even useful – it’s just a landing page to push you to write a review of the system in exchange for two $10 gift cards two to four weeks after approval. So, great... Even worse, the USB device doesn’t show up as an actual drive in Windows or Device Manager, rendering it an utter waste of resources. It wasn’t malware, but it sure acted like it.

Conclusion

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We would have liked to recommend this CyberpowerPC 9800X3D system, but we can't because of the way it was set up, but it’s close. This system is metaphorically one step short of greatness. It reminds us of another Cyberpower pre-built we reviewed, where we concluded it was good, but should have its cooler replaced. This means that the PC represents an odd mixture of someone who wants to buy an enthusiast pre-built PC but is still okay with manually making changes to the build.

It does a lot correctly, but critically fails to offer sufficient CPU cooling, causing the fans to ramp constantly and loudly. This also hinders performance during the heavy CPU load scenarios by dropping 200MHz below what it should run at.

As for the rest: The part configuration is good on paper, with the possible exception of over-speccing the PSU, but at least that doesn’t hurt the system. And remember, this predates this 5070 announcement. The 9800X3D is obviously a phenomenal CPU for gaming and the 4070 Super is strong enough to play games at 1080p at high refresh rate and most games at 1440p, possibly needing to lower settings in graphics-heavy titles.

The OS, driver, and software setup are all solid, with up to date drivers and an unbloated Windows experience. Cyberpower’s attention to detail on the GPU driver really impressed us, as they must have installed that right before it went out the door. The included keyboard and mouse are actually OK, as was the quick start guide for novices. The automatically-executing script on the USB drive is not only suspicious, but also just a disappointing waste.

Cyberpower did most of this well. It’s unfortunate that we’ve been through this with Cyberpower a few times over about a decade of buying their pre-builts now, because they often nail a lot of it -- and they’re especially competitive on price -- but screw it up on the thermals. We don’t know what it is that’s so hard for them in the thermal configuration process, but if Cyberpower can figure that out and permanently rectify it, we really wouldn’t have much to complain about. They’d probably get our recommendations regularly.

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NVIDIA RTX 5090 PCIe 5.0 vs. 4.0 vs. 3.0 x16 Scaling Benchmarksjimmy_thang February 13, 2025

We compare the PCIe generation differences using the RTX 5090 across PCIe 5.0 x16, PCIe 4.0 x16, and PCIe 3.0 x16

The Highlights

• For our setup, we used our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU test bench coupled with an RTX 5090
• The maximal difference between PCIe gen 5 vs gen 3 was roughly 1-4%
• Overall, we did not find a significant difference in performance between PCIe gen 3 vs gen 5

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Out of respect for your time: The answer is 1 to 4%. It’s 1-4% different between PCIe Gen5 and PCIe Gen3 x16 on the RTX 5090. Gen4 x16 and Gen5 x16 are about equal to each other, with some instances of Gen3 x16 (which is comparable to Gen4 x8 in bandwidth) yielding about a 4% advantage to Gen5 x16.

So that’s the bottom-line up front and save you the time, but we’ll also make this story simple while hopefully giving some background on PCIe.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 28, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Mike Gaglione

Jeremy Clayton

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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These stories are always really fun experiments and some of the simplest we do. Today, we’re testing PCIe generation impact on the RTX 5090 (read our review). We love doing these stories because they allow us to look at the future of the interface and protocol to try and see where it might start limiting high-end devices. Historically, we’ve seen about a 1-3% swing from the newest generation to the prior one when at the front-edge of a new PCIe generation. The RTX 5090 is unique for being the first super high-end consumer video card with PCIe Gen5 support natively, so we’ll test scaling from Gen3, Gen4, and Gen5.

In most scenarios, anyone spending $2,000 on a GPU won’t be running PCIe Gen3 -- but it’s still an interesting test, and PCIe Gen3 x16 would be comparable in maximum theoretical bandwidth to PCIe Gen4 x8, so it still helps there.

This should be a quick and fun look at PCIe scaling.

Overview & Differences

We don’t want to judge you if you’re a super gamer who would be hindered by a 1-4% loss, but most people aren’t going to notice.

Because the content is so simple and you have the answer already, we’re going to do some explainer basics for anyone brushing up on how it all works. 

Here’s a chart showing the maximum theoretical bandwidth of different PCIe generations. Wikipedia has always been great for this. The PCIe generation technically goes up to a planned Gen7 this year, but currently, the highest-end supported on consumer motherboards is PCIe Gen5. 

Each PCIe slot has a certain amount of electrical lanes and a certain physical slot size. Although some slots look like they are full x16 length, they may be x8 wiring. In almost every modern motherboard relevant to our audience though, the first PCIe slot will be fully wired for 16 lanes. 

PCIe Gen5 on transfers 32 GT/s per lane, which means x16 is about 63 GB/s and x8 is 31.5GB/s. If we shift the highlights right one column and up one row, you’ll see that PCIe Gen4’s x8 speed is the same as PCIe Gen5’s x4 speed and that PCIe Gen4’s x16 speed is the same as PCIe Gen5’s x8 speed for the maximum theoretical bandwidth. This pattern of doubling continues all the way up, so PCIe Gen3 x16 is the same as PCIe Gen4 x8 in maximum theoretical bandwidth.

That simplifies things for us, because that means testing PCIe Gen3 x16 will achieve effectively the same thing as testing PCIe Gen4 x8, so we can cut our testing in half since the speed mostly just doubles generationally.

Another thing to be aware of is that interfaces and protocols often are not the limiter, but the device. Unless you’re buying the newest device on an outgoing interface, like SATA or AGP at some point, the device will typically be incapable of saturating the link it’s connected to.

Explaining Support

PCIe support needs to match on 3 devices in order to utilize the maximum supported generation on any one link in the chain.

For PCIe Gen5 support on the RTX 5090 to be actually utilized, you’d need the motherboard, GPU, and CPU to all support the same maximum PCIe generation. In this block diagram above of a CPU, you can see that there are at least 16 PEG lanes, or PCIe Graphics lanes, available to the motherboard for use with the GPU. 

These lanes peel straight off of the CPU and don’t go through the chipset first and are often assigned to the top PCIe slot.

That slot then needs to actually be a PCIe Gen5 slot, in this example. Finally, the GPU itself needs to be PCIe Gen5.

All of these things can work together without being the same generation. You can use a Gen3 motherboard with a Gen5 card or a Gen5 motherboard with a Gen3 card. They will still work through the interface, but the maximum theoretical bandwidth will cap at the slowest speed of any device linked in the chain.

While we’re on the subject, a common misconception is that a full-length PCIe slot is automatically going to be a x16 slot. First, a lot of PCIe slots are not electrically wired for x16. You can see this by looking into the slot for the pins. If you see half populated, it’s x8. If you see even fewer, it’s x4, but full-length possibly just to be capable of accepting a full-physical length card.

Likewise, PCIe slots wired from the chipset rather than the CPU may run on an older PCIe generation and will also have to jump through a link to the CPU. You can check your motherboard manual for how they wire these slots.

And as a final note: Some GPUs only run on x8. This can be problematic for users of older generation motherboards, because suddenly a PCIe Gen4 x8 card will suffer on PCIe Gen3. The RX 6500 XT (watch our review) is even worse: It’s Gen4 x4, so socketing it into a Gen3 slot will significantly hamper it.

This isn’t a problem on the 5090 since it’s fully wired for x16, but worth bringing up.

Testing

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OK, enough explanation. A few things on testing: We ran some of our most consistent benchmarks, but ultimately, they all show the same thing so we’re keeping the total count of charts low and simple. 

One thing we aren’t testing is machine learning or so-called “AI” performance, so we can’t speak to how the behavior might change there. It’s possible there would be an impact. We’re focusing on the gaming impact today.

If you want to see what test platform we are using, our game settings, and more of our methodological information for GPU benchmarking, you can visit our living test bench document for all of that. 

Let’s get to the benchmarks.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

Dying Light 2 at 4K showed a maximum difference of 1 FPS AVG between results. If anything, we’re excited about the remarkable consistency as it gives us some confidence in this game’s low run-to-run variance with this test pattern. The PCIe Gen3 x16 result appears to slightly lose performance. We’re looking at about a 1% difference. Lows are not meaningfully affected, especially given their wider deviation, but it does appear there is a similar reduction.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the Gen5 result was at 216.1 FPS AVG, with Gen4 at 215.5 and Gen3 at 215.4. These are functionally the same. There might be a slight difference here, but not one anyone would ever notice in gaming...unless, you’re a super gamer.

Black Myth - 4K

In Black Myth: Wukong at 4K, the Gen5 result held 85.5 FPS AVG, Gen4 held 84.7, and Gen3 held 83.1. That is a progression, but not a meaningful one. The 84.7 to 85.5 results are within reasonable run-to-run variance of +/- 1 FPS. The Gen3 result allows the Gen5 result a 2.9% advantage, which does appear to be a real change, but not one to worry about. Lows are not outside of usual here.

Black Myth - 1440p

At 1440p, the range was 124.8 to 129.9. This is the widest range yet at 4%, some of which will be variance. The lows scale mostly in-line with the average. This is one of the more interesting results, and even then, you’re going to be far more limited by whatever CPU is still on Gen3 than the PCIe generation itself. This would also be comparable to a Gen4 x8 result by theoretical bandwidth. 

Black Myth - 1080p

1080p was pretty interesting. The range was 153.3 to 159.8. The Gen5 result was again about 4.2% ahead of the Gen3 result and 1.7% ahead of the Gen4 result. These are real differences and the Gen3 result is noteworthy, but when 4% is an exciting change, you know there’s not much to talk about.

RT: Black Myth - 4K

Because Black Myth: Wukong was so interesting, here’s the ray tracing results for the same. The 4K result has the Gen4 and Gen5 entries identical. The Gen3 test is behind by about 2 FPS AVG, which again seems repeatable and real, but not particularly interesting. That’s about 2.6%.

RT: Black Myth - 1080p

At 1080p with ray tracing, Black Myth runs at 158 FPS AVG for the Gen5 result and 151 for the Gen3 result, establishing a 4.2% improvement to the Gen5 option. This aligns with the non-RT results.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 at 4K rasterized has Gen5 at 206.7 FPS AVG, Gen4 identical, and Gen3 at 204.2 FPS AVG. The improvement from Gen3 to Gen5 is 1.2%.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the range was 344 to 349 FPS AVG. Lows are again incredibly consistent between Gen4 and Gen5 results, which is encouraging to see from a methodological standpoint. On a technicality, Gen4 is 0.3 FPS AVG ahead of Gen5, but this is within error and variance. There’s no difference. The Gen3 result is slower, with Gen4 and Gen5 about 1-1.4% faster.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

At 1080p, the 5090 Gen4 and Gen5 results are again within variance of each other. Gen4 is 3% faster than Gen3 here.

F1 24 - 4K

Let’s look at one more, but we have enough here to come to a conclusion.

In F1 24 at 4K, the Gen5 5090 result ran at 291 FPS AVG and was basically tied with the Gen4 result. The Gen3 result ran at 285 FPS AVG, so the fastest entry leads Gen3 by 2%. 

Conclusion

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As we said at the start, this one is really simple. 1-4% is the difference we observed between PCIe Gen5 vs PCIe Gen 3. We ran this test in 16 scenarios mixing rasterization and ray tracing for different games, including 3 resolutions for each. The tests matched our RTX 5090 review test suite.

This is the same we’ve seen every generation, which is between a 1-3% difference. Where it would really matter if there’s some 6500 XT type of card where the manufacturer x4 or x8 instead of a 16 wired card. That’s where the generation would really start to potentially matter.

Not many people are going to be slotting in a $2,000 card into a really old motherboard, but even if you did, the Gen 3 x16 results don’t look like a huge deal, where you’d maybe start to lose 2-4% performance maximally from what we’ve seen.

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"Fake Frames" Tested | DLSS 4.0, MFG 4X, & NVIDIA's Misleading Review Guidejimmy_thang February 12, 2025

We take a look at NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.0 multi-frame generation, NVIDIA's weird decisions on testing tools, differences between transformer vs. CNN, and more

The Highlights

• DLSS 4.0 has added Multi Frame Generation 3X and 4X and has changed the underlying model for the other DLSS features
• For its FrameView tool, NVIDIA incorporated some outdated PresentMon code while not meaningfully contributing to the open-source software
• The ideal scenario for frame gen is to make already acceptable framerates into extra-smooth framerates on high refresh displays

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

[Update: as of 2/4/2025, we've confirmed that NVIDIA has reached out to Intel regarding PresentMon contributions.]

As simply as possible, NVIDIA is being a dick. NVIDIA has inducted open-source software into its FrameView tool, made its own "improvements" without, as far as we can tell, contributing those same changes to the original source code base, and then distributed outdated information to the press in a 100+ page review guide talking about how to properly test its devices. While NVIDIA has some valid points in how to measure generated frames, the biggest counterpoint is that their statements are based on year-old software that already made a major shift away from the msBetweenPresents metric that NVIDIA is now contesting. The license allows NVIDIA to act this way, but it’s just not productive and can actually be detrimental to testing efforts. Intel has told us that NVIDIA is welcome to contribute to the PresentMon tool and play with everyone else, but NVIDIA is doing NVIDIA things.

Editor's note: This was originally published on February 1, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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As for why this is happening: It’s all relevant because of frame generation and multi-frame generation, which is the topic we’re digging into today. Whatever you want to call them -- generated frames, artificial frames, or “fake frames” -- they are very difficult to test and measure accurately. 

We’re only scratching the surface of this complicated subject today. This article will first define what DLSS 4.0 actually is and what it’s inclusive of, we’ll cover benchmarking methodology concerns and our issues with NVIDIA’s framing of it (plus the things they get right), and then we’ll present some performance data evaluating NVIDIA’s new models. There is something interesting here, and we absolutely think frame generation is worth talking about as a smoothing method but it’s going to take a couple of stories to get through as it’s complicated. 

Overview

Despite the problems we have with NVIDIA’s PresentMon framing, DLSS 4.0 is worth diving into. NVIDIA seems aware of how confusing the rollout of the new DLSS features is going to be, and its mix of DLSS version numbering and GPU generation support make it complicated to follow.

You may have seen this chart before that details the feature set and what does and doesn’t work across various RTX series GPUs. Some of this is segmentation, some of it is hardware, some of it is potentially temporary segmentation that could be changed.

DLSS Overview

Taking a step back, DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling. That name was already strange seven years ago when it was introduced, because supersampling usually means rendering above the native resolution of a display and downscaling. For example, rendering your game at 4K on a 1080 screen would result in an expensive but crisp image with excellent anti-aliasing. DLSS is upscaling, which is the opposite. For DLSS, NVIDIA trained an algorithm on sets of extremely high resolution screenshots on a per-game basis, and then used that algorithm for real-time upscaling: you could (for example) render your game at 1080 on a 4K screen and get a cheap but mostly okay-looking image. The use of high resolution screenshots for training is what made it kind-of-sort-of supersampling; DLSS is no longer trained per-game, but the name has stuck around.

All of this was relatively straightforward until DLSS 3.0 came out in 2022 which introduced Optical Multi-Frame Generation. 

OMFG continues NVIDIA’s propensity for initialisms like MFAA. OMFG is Optical Multi Frame Generation (later referred to as Frame Generation 2X or just plain Frame Generation, because now DLSS 4 has Multi Frame Generation). With this, the original functionality of DLSS was renamed DLSS Super Resolution. Now we're at a point where NVIDIA could recommend, for example, enabling Deep Learning Super Sampling Super Resolution Ultra Performance.

As for Frame Generation, it falls under the DLSS umbrella even though it's not directly tied to supersampling or upscaling. DLSS 3.5 added ray reconstruction to the DLSS family, and now DLSS 4.0 has added Multi Frame Generation 3X and 4X and has changed the underlying model for the other DLSS features.

So, DLSS 4, DLSS 3.5, DLSS 3, et al. are groups of features and updates. If a game has "DLSS 4," that means it has some of the DLSS 4 features, most likely MFG, but not necessarily all of them.

The claims that with 50 series AI handles "15 out of every 16 pixels" to "multipl[y] frame rates by up to 8X" are based on using the maximum 4X MFG setting with the DLSS Super Resolution set to Performance, which was formerly the minimum quality setting. That would mean that at 4K, one 1080 frame would be rendered for every four frames displayed.

Multi Frame Generation

MFG is available for the 50-series cards; as of this writing, no other cards support MULTI Frame Generation. Frame generation can be supported elsewhere but MFG is unique to the 50 series right now. It’s also the centerpiece of NVIDIA’s misleading marketing slides claiming 2x performance gains of the 5090 over the 4090.

The misleading chart above is because MFG includes 4X (which is up to three AI frames for every one rendered) and 3X (up to two AI frames for one rendered) modes. The existing Frame Generation (2X) mode has been improved, but remains exclusive to 40-series and newer, and FG, in general, still only works in games that implement it.

To paraphrase NVIDIA, the original implementation of Frame Generation combined four elements: a previous frame A, a current frame B, an “optical flow field generated by Ada’s Optical Flow Accelerator,” and data provided directly from the game engine about motion and other elements. Using these inputs, the card could throw together a so-called "fake" frame, or a generated one, between A and B at the cost of queueing up frame B for a little while. 

Now of course, it’d be ridiculous and a fundamental misrepresentation of the nature of frame generation if you were to get on stage and say something untrue like "it can predict the future."

It doesn't extrapolate into the future, it interpolates (intelligently) into the past. This gets confusing if you think about it too much.

This creates the feeling of a smoother framerate with some added latency, which is why NVIDIA Reflex has always been a mandatory setting when enabling Frame Generation, a feature that we've covered in detail. Reflex clears the render queue so that frames are delivered with as little latency as possible, which helps mitigate the latency inherent to frame generation. 

Fundamentally, it seems that Frame Generation, in general, is not for turning low framerates into playable framerates: it's for turning playable framerates into high framerates. This is still true for MFG; as NVIDIA stated to Digital Foundry, "the acceptable input framerate is still about the same for 3X or 4X as it was for 2X." 

Higher input rates mean fresher data for Frame Generation, smaller gaps to bridge, and less time to notice flaws. That’s the theory. MFG is still bridging the same gap between the newest rendered frame and the previous one, it's just doing it with up to three AI frames rather than one. On the plus side, this theoretically means that latency shouldn't be worse with MFG than with regular FG.

If you have a 60Hz monitor, it appears that you are not the target audience. There's no point in using Frame Generation to boost past your monitor's refresh rate. That's not just our opinion: rendering at rates higher than the display refresh rate can reduce latency, but generating frames at a higher rate is just wasting compute power on frames you won't see. This is why NVIDIA's DLSS 4 demos have topped out around 240FPS.

As for the Optical Flow Accelerator, with DLSS 4, Ada's hardware Optical Flow Accelerator is out of the picture. 

DLSS 4 Frame Generation is solely handled by regular Tensor cores, which is why Digital Foundry asked that question about Frame Generation (not MFG) potentially coming to more cards. NVIDIA claims that the new model is faster and uses less VRAM, which makes it feel like the only point of the OFA was to make frame gen exclusive to the 40 series. MFG is not possible using the old model since it "would be required for every new generated frame, and the performance cost would throttle the GPU, resulting in lower input frame rates." 

NVIDIA did confirm to us that Blackwell, which is the new architecture for the 50 series, does have a hardware OFA unit, and we presume that it'll be used for backwards compatibility with games that don't implement the new framegen model.

Time to get into flip metering and some issues we’ve had with NVIDIA’s flawed understanding of PresentMon, plus NVIDIA’s stated reason for restricting MFG to the 50-series.

Flip Metering

NVIDIA has given two reasons for locking MFG to 50-series: first, the 5th generation Tensor cores are significantly improved, and second, Blackwell has hardware support for Flip Metering. 

Flip Metering shifts responsibility for frame pacing from the CPU to the GPU driver in order to effectively pace out fake frames (or generated ones), which has become more important with MFG. This takes place immediately prior to scanout. Again, Blackwell's implementation of Flip Metering is hardware based, so it can't be ported to 40-series as-is.

This is where NVIDIA’s flawed understanding of PresentMon comes in.

PresentMon is a fully open-source utility that is maintained by Intel, but can be contributed to by anybody. Other companies like AMD have worked with Intel on maintaining and advancing parts of PresentMon. 

PresentMon measures performance. It captures data. It’s able to work at a lower level with Windows and helps to analyze the frame time, framerate performance, animation error, and more. It is the key backbone to most of the performance analysis software that’s out there. Even if you don’t use PresentMon, if you’re an enthusiast who tries to measure your performance, you might use something else that does. CapFrameX is a reskin of PresentMon, and RTSS also appears to use PresentMon. We just use the core command line version of it, but recently helped JayzTwoCents start using the user interface version of PresentMon.

Intel’s Tom Petersen has joined us several times to explain advancements to it and how it works. It is one of the most trusted testing utilities for measuring component performance, and, again, its open source nature is critical to that, especially as it’s maintained by Intel. 

Unfortunately, NVIDIA has decided not to contribute to and maintain PresentMon in a significant way, and that positions us like a marriage counselor talking to Intel on the PresentMon side and NVIDIA on the “they-don’t-understand-how-it-works-side-but-they-sure-have-some-opinions” side. NVIDIA has instead taken an ancient version of PresentMon core and inducted it into its FrameView application. It then proceeded to make adjustments to that code, but as far as we can tell, NVIDIA has elected not to contribute to the open-source project it took from. This has resulted in a bifurcation of major versions between applications. This is a big problem and NVIDIA is sort of at the heart of it. 

Related to Flip Metering, NVIDIA has pushed hard for a switch from PresentMon's MsBetweenPresents metric to the MsBetweenDisplayChange metric. While we understand why they’re trying to do this, we think this is a flawed premise. That’s because PresentMon already switched off of MsBetweenPresents, and in fact, began doing so around a year ago when Tom Petersen joined us to talk about the change. NVIDIA is pushing for a change that everyone already made except for them, as they were running an older version of PresentMon in their FrameView tool. That’d be like saying “Y’know, I think it’s about time we consider electricity instead of candles.”

We think NVIDIA’s FrameView software is most likely based on PresentMon 1.10.0 from February of 2024, based on inspecting the results output.

The current version of PresentMon (2.3.0) no longer supports either of the metrics NVIDIA is talking about under those names, switching instead to a FrameTime metric based on CPUBusy and CPUWait (which NVIDIA says is also inadequate). 

MsBetweenPresents is an ancient metric inherited from FRAPS, which was basically the only frametime tracking tool around when PresentMon began development. It tracks the time between Present calls, which tell the graphics engine to finish up and put the frame on the screen, but it doesn't reflect animation time or time on screen. 

MsBetweenDisplayChange ALSO doesn't track animation time. Intel defines it as "How long the previous frame was displayed before this Present() was displayed, in milliseconds" versus msBetweenPresents, which was "the time between this Present() call and the previous one, in milliseconds." In contrast, the current PresentMon FrameTime metric is the best estimate of the time between the game taking snapshots of its physics engine. 

Despite NVIDIA’s decision to not participate in supporting the tool everyone else does and instead maintain its own out-of-date toys, it does have one good point in all of this. The valid part is that situations like MFG have a problem, where there's external frame metering very late in the pipeline that may make the on-screen framerate smoother than MsBetweenPresents would imply. Using MsBetweenDisplayChange does allow NVIDIA's flip metering to be taken into account, so it makes sense to use it specifically for tracking NVIDIA’s frame generation.

But we don’t think MsBetweenDisplayChange is sufficient, either, and that’s what NVIDIA is telling everyone to use.

We mentioned animation error, which we’ve talked about with Tom Petersen in the past: just because frames are delivered at an even pace doesn't mean that the things being shown in those frames have been animated at an even pace. Animation times and flip times must be consistent. 

This was a problem with SLI and CrossFire, where frames could be delivered at a constant rate, but could appear stuttery anyway because animation timing didn't line up with the flip timing. Ideally, in the long term, we'd move towards using FPS as a metric for raw horsepower and animation error as a metric for smoothness so to speak, but that's outside the scope of this piece.

A more specific issue, frankly put, is that NVIDIA is being a dick about PresentMon, an open-source tool, claiming that "FrameView has solved certain bugs to make MsBetweenDisplayChange accurate in more scenarios" without communicating those changes to the developers. That leaves us with a situation where we're forced to use NVIDIA's version of an open-source tool that NVIDIA has closed off, to then test NVIDIA's hardware because of unspecified updates that NVIDIA has made with supposedly bug fixes that NVIDIA has not explicitly disclosed. You can see why there are a lot of problems measuring an NVIDIA product. This also calls the entirety of the premise into question, as there are no external means to inspect NVIDIA’s tools. 

This isn’t illegal under PresentMon's current license, but it is rude. AMD is even currently collaborating to support tracking Fluid Motion Frames, but NVIDIA is not.

Anyway, let’s get back to MFG and DLSS. We’ll talk about image enhancements next.

Image Enhancements

NVIDIA is switching away from Convolutional Neural Networks to a transformer model for DLSS (rolling out as a beta). This change affects all RTX cards. The gist is that the new model should have a better understanding of which areas of the screen are important, and therefore, according to the reviewer’s guide, has "greater stability, reduced ghosting, higher detail in motion, and smoother edges in a scene." This is an image quality improvement, not a performance improvement, and may actually worsen performance a bit. NVIDIA notes that "While Ada and Blackwell both benefit from this new model, the Transformer model is often more performant on Blackwell." 

We'll show our own results later in this piece.

Driver Overrides

For each of the DLSS4 features we've discussed—the new frame generation model, multi frame generation, and the transformer model for DLSS SR and RR—there are now driver-level overrides. For example, with a game that supported the original FG and a card that supports MFG, you could use the driver to force MFG. This is a whitelist system, so not every game will support overriding, and the ones that do won't necessarily have every DLSS 4 feature available. We don't expect this to get a ton of use; the interface is (currently) confusing, and we'd assume that most developers willing to go through the hassle of getting whitelisted for overrides will just update their games.

Reflex 2.0

There are plenty of other new features that were announced alongside the 50 series, but we're just talking about DLSS here. NVIDIA Reflex isn't technically DLSS, but it is a dependency, so we're throwing it in. Reflex's new feature is "Frame Warp," which is similar to the reprojection tech that's been used in VR. It checks mouse input at the last possible moment, and if it detects an update, it shifts the camera over to approximate the correct movement. The unrendered pixels are then painted in. Whether or not this represents a literal reduction in latency is arguable, but it should feel like it.

Performance Testing

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Time to get into performance testing. We have a couple groups of comparisons here. The primary objective is to compare the impact of the old and new models that NVIDIA is using, not to compare the RTX 4090 to the RTX 5090. There are a lot of challenges with analyzing so-called “fake” frames though, one of which is that it isn’t clear that the amount of generated frames remains consistent. Another challenge is that, although we will have a control on the charts for “pure” frames, generated frames aren’t a like-for-like comparison by the very nature of them not being the same as standard rendered frames.

Our test bench information is detailed on the website, which is free of third-party ads and includes the hardware configuration. You can check that out for the hardware if you want to know what we’re using.

Another important thing: We're not covering image quality in this piece -- that’ll come later -- but we will go over performance numbers. Image quality is an entirely different deep-dive. 

NVIDIA provided six games to press with the new DLSS 4 features available. We dug through them to find some way to isolate features for testing. Four of the games had native feature implementations and two were whitelisted for driver overrides. 

As mentioned earlier, we were forced to use FrameView for all benchmarks involving frame generation. For the purposes of these tests, we're including generated frames in our averages.

Old Frame Generation VS Enhanced Frame Generation

Our first task was to compare performance of the old framegen model to the new one on both a 4090 and a 5090. The company has not claimed that image quality will change or improve with the new method. The only two games available to us with BOTH models were Marvel Rivals and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, both through driver overrides, but we were also able to make a usable comparison with Hogwarts Legacy. We’re using the games that work with it.

For this set of charts, we’re focusing on comparing the upcoming red and orange bars for the impact of different models. The blue bar is all real frames, meaning the comparison is not like-for-like with the generated frames. 

We’re just going to present the numbers and talk about them. It’s a very tricky subject, which benefits NVIDIA because it makes it hard to evaluate, but that is the nature of artificially generated data.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Here’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard at 4K with maximum settings. We manually increased it above the highest preset here. DLSS SR and AA were not used for these tests and Reflex was enabled even for the control runs without frame generation. 

Each card should be compared against itself. We’ll start on the 4090. The new model with FG2X on the 4090 ran at 107 FPS AVG against the old model’s result of 100.7 FPS AVG, an increase in fake+real frame perceived performance of 6.26%. If we were to filter out the fake frames to only real frames to evaluate the overhead, then that percentage change comes down.

The RTX 5090 ran at 143.4 FPS AVG on the new model and 136.4 on the old model, an improvement in the as-captured result of 5.1% uplift in perceived performance. Again, there’s more nuance if you filter out the artificial frames.

Hogwarts Legacy

Hogwarts Legacy is up next. This one didn't have a driver-level override for the frame generation model, so we had to control that variable by switching back and forth from the press build, otherwise the results would be invalid. But, complicating it more, RT features were updated in the press build, so we disabled all RT effects for these tests. We first compared the public and press versions of the game with frame generation off to ensure that the comparison is even valid. Disabling RT effectively equalized performance between the versions (107.3 to 106.9 is within error, as is 151.9 to 152.6), making them valid for comparison.

Hogwarts Legacy FG Comparison

That brings us to this chart: In Hogwarts Legacy, the 4090 had a 14% uplift in (perceived) performance from 153 FPS up to 175 FPS average with the new model, while the 5090 had a 10% uplift from 224 to 247 FPS average.

Working backwards based on the output framerates, we can deduce that the new frame generation model is easier on the GPU. This allows more resources to be dedicated to rendering, enables a higher input framerate, and that then comes back around to benefiting frame generation. The other piece of the puzzle will be determining whether subjective image quality has changed in a later story, but from a performance perspective, switching away from the OFA is better.

DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction CNN versus Transformer

The second feature we tested in isolation was the old Convolutional Neural Network model versus the new Transformer model. This affects both DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Ray Reconstruction; we were able to test SR in isolation, but RR (ray reconstruction) requires SR to be enabled.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

First up is Veilguard, again using the driver override feature for A:B testing. Ray reconstruction isn't an available feature in this game, so this is purely a super resolution test. We used the DLSS SR Quality preset which, given the 4K output resolution, means a 2560x1440 render resolution. 

On the 4090, performance suffered using the new Transformer model versus the older CNN model, with the older model retaining a 5% performance advantage. The "No DLSS" control result is included for context, but that's not the comparison we're focusing on here.

On the 5090, the older CNN model had a similar performance advantage of 4%, averaging 105 FPS versus 101 with the Transformer model.

The difference between performance degradation on the two cards is miniscule, but these results would technically align with NVIDIA's claim about the Transformer model being "more performant on Blackwell." The differences are too small here to make that a firm conclusion. What we can say with certainty is that the new model is a little lower performance than the old one in Veilguard.

Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty

Cyberpunk 2077: “Crashing Liberty” is up next. When it works, it has ray reconstruction as a feature, so we were able to test both DLSS SR alone and DLSS SR and RR in combination…when it worked. As noted during our DLSS 3.5 coverage, it's possible for ray reconstruction to raise or lower performance depending on the systems that it replaces in a given game; however, it continues to have no significant performance impact in Cyberpunk. We recorded results without RR, but we cut them from these charts because it made no difference.

The losses aren't huge: the 4090 with DLSS and ray reconstruction dropped from 71 FPS with CNN to 68 FPS with the transformer model, a 5% advantage for the old model in terms of performance.

On the 5090, switching to the new model dropped average FPS from 92 to 86, a 7% performance advantage for the older model on this card. Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that the newer model reduces ghosting and visibly improves the appearance of animated textures in Cyberpunk, so this level of performance loss is likely an acceptable tradeoff.

Because the new DLSS SR/RR model comes with a performance hit (unlike the straight upgrade to FG), we expect many games updated to support the model will take the same approach as Cyberpunk (hopefully without the crashing) and offer a choice between CNN and Transformer in settings. Hopefully those toggles actually work: we always relaunch games between settings changes, but we noticed that relaunching Cyberpunk with our specific settings would switch to the Transformer model invisibly while still claiming to use CNN in the menu. We were forced to toggle CNN off and on from inside the game in order to test it reliably. All of this was observed in the public 2.21 Steam release. This is an extremely subtle bug that wasted a ton of our time.

Frame Metering

Our final performance comparisons are frame pacing with Frame Generation enabled. This comes with two major caveats: first, we're using FrameView for logging, so the plotted frametimes are MsBetweenDisplayChange. Second, we don't have a way to toggle frame metering on the 5090, so we're forced to make a general comparison between FG 2X behavior on the 4090 (without frame metering) versus the 5090 (with frame metering). Ideally, we'd run FG 4X on the 5090 alone, with versus without frame metering. 

The new framegen model was used for these comparisons.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Here’s Dragon Age again.

As always, making a comparative plot is complicated by the fact that the higher-performance card renders more frames. The 4090's plot shows the kind of up-and-down variation between every frame that might be expected from frame generation, with the majority of the pass oscillating up and down by 1-2ms on each individual frame. That may not be enough to cause a visible problem in this title, but it's a good illustration of the problem that NVIDIA is trying to address. The 5090 actually had visibly wider deviations from the average on the whole, but the up-and-down deviations didn't occur between every single consecutive frame. We’d want to see much flatter lines, ideally. Most people notice excursions at 8-12ms, based on prior interviews we’ve done, but you’d still want a flatter line ideally.

Hogwarts Legacy

Hogwarts Legacy showed results closer to what NVIDIA promised with frame metering. The 4090 still exhibits some up-and-down behavior between individual frames as "real" and "fake" frames alternate, while the 5090's frametimes are clearly more stable. The game also renders at a very high framerate, though, so the actual time delta in milliseconds between frames is miniscule even on the 4090. The 5090 also doesn't completely eliminate the occasional frametime spike, with a particularly large one shown at the end of this pass.

Conclusion

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Breaking down DLSS 4 into its individual components: the new frame generation model performs better broadly speaking and there shouldn't be a tradeoff in visual fidelity, although we haven't confirmed that. The updated model also theoretically makes single frame generation possible on other Tensor-equipped RTX cards, but NVIDIA has made no indication that it plans to support that.

The new Transformer model for DLSS SR and RR performs worse than the older CNN model, but it should also look better, and our anecdotal experience so far suggests that it's worth it. We may follow up with an in-depth visual comparison.

Frame pacing with frame generation enabled should be improved versus 40 series, but this would mostly apply to MFG, and 40 series can't do MFG. Still, our extremely limited testing does show that frame metering has an effect.

We'd also like to really drive home that the ideal scenario for frame gen is to make already acceptable framerates into extra-smooth framerates on high refresh displays, like the 4K 240Hz OLEDs that have been coming out recently. Sometimes NVIDIA seems aware of this, and other times it claims that the 5070 is equivalent to a 4090 because of MFG. If you have bad performance, Frame Generation may disappoint you; DLSS Super Resolution is a more helpful option in that situation.

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Lab Report: ASUS Q-Release PCIe Mechanism Damage & Claimsjimmy_thang February 7, 2025

We observe evidence around ASUS’ Q-Release PCIe slot causing scratches on video cards

The Highlights

• The ASUS Q-Release PCIe slot was designed to feature a buttonless design that is supposed to make removing video cards from motherboards easier
• ASUS’ Q-Release Slim mechanism appears to be causing damage to the GPU’s PCIe-connector
• The damage is hard to notice until around 60 or so re-installations

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

The below is a research report that we wrote originally for internal use. The ASUS Q-Release PCIe slot has been in the news lately for potentially scratching the PCIe slot of video cards. ASUS published a statement about the Q-Release slot and got our attention. We found the fact that it was publishing a statement seemingly randomly to be odd, so we looked into what prompted it.

This report is what we wrote to determine if the Q-Release PCIe story deserved a full video or not. We pulled facts together and determined it wasn’t worth pursuing as a standalone video (as it simply didn’t seem to be a major issue), but thought it was worth running as a news story and published this report for two reasons: (1) The public might benefit from it, for anyone who has similar questions, and (2) it may become a bigger story in the future, so having our research publicly preserved will help if that’s the case. The big question will be if ASUS rejects warranties related to this, such as if the Q-Release slot damages the gold pins on a video card at any point.

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Credits

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Writing

Steve Burke
Tannen Williams

Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Below follows the research write-up to recap the topic as it stands today.

Research

Uniko’s Hardware Article & Testing Video: 

Uniko’s Hardware uploaded a video plugging and unplugging an ASUS PRIME RTX 4060 Ti OC 8GB into a ROG STRIX X870-A GAMING WIFI 60 times. These are the before and after results:

Uniko’s Hardware reports: “After the 60th time, the graphics card still works normally without any faults. After the 60th time, the right corner of the PEG power supply part of the PCB (corresponding to the metal spring in the ASUS special slot) is slightly worn, showing white spots, and the inner side shows black spots.”

This was the result after 3 installs/removals. It may be difficult to recognize, but it seems every single plug/unplug cycle may cause extremely minor cosmetic damage to the inside corner of the PEG power supply, which normally isn’t apparent until around 60 or so removals.

Uniko’s Hardware wasn’t extra careful when unplugging the card, but they did seem to mostly follow ASUS’ guidelines for unplugging the card, however they might not have exaggerated the “slight tilt” as much as ASUS would have preferred.

Source: https://unikoshardware.com/2025/01/test-asus-pcie-q-release-slim.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TdYEknfHgM&t=83s

ASUS’ Press Release Statement

ASUS posted a press release on January 31st that included detailed instructions on how to use the Q-release Slim mechanism, along with these illustrations.

ASUS stated:

“In our internal testing and evaluation of the extremely small number of cases reported we found no damage to the motherboard or graphics card that would affect functionality or performance. However, it is important to emphasize that any type of PCIe add-in card will exhibit signs of usage and wear marking after 60 continuous insertions and removals.”

In the questions section of their webpage, ASUS asked itself “Is ASUS working on design revision/change?” ASUS replied, “If the graphics card is inserted and removed following the manufacturer's recommended installation methods, there should be no issues.” 

ASUS noted, likely in response to the Uniko’s Hardware test video, “60 insertions with incorrect methods caused additional wear, making usage marks more apparent. Incorrect angles and excessive force can cause further scratches but do not affect the functionality of the graphics card or motherboard.”

ASUS noted there were no reported issues on the original Q-Release (non-slim) mechanism, making it seem like they possibly overcomplicated things by trying to advance the design.

In a comment on the Intel subreddit that ASUS posted this statement on, ASUS was asked if these cosmetic marks would cause ASUS to deny warranty claims, to which an ASUS (North America) representative pointed out:

“First, we note that if there is an issue caused by the Q-Release Slim slot, we'll take care of end-users in the North America region. I make that distinction because I cover only the NA region.

Second, despite the visual damage you could see that were posted on social media, both cards were unaffected when tested for performance and functionality.

Third, and this is based on many years that I've done customer service previously at a competitor, it's not uncommon to see some signs of usage or wear and tear on the gold fingers just through normal use. In addition to some level of wear by inserting and removing the card, you can also slightly scratch the gold fingers when you miss the slot or set it down on a rough surface, etc. But this kind of wear doesn't typically damage the card in a way that prevents it from normal operation, and purely cosmetic scratches shouldn't void warranty.

Lastly, the type of damage you see on the PCIe connector that will void warranty typically involves severe scratches to the connector that exposes metal and/or damage that looks like the card was dropped and made contact with the ground. In these cases, it's usually apparent that the damage is no longer cosmetic and the card probably won't function at all.”

Because it’s the video cards that are damaged, and not the motherboard, we wonder how much authority ASUS has for speaking on warranties for other manufacturers.

Source: https://www.asus.com/us/news/ya8rt06hmk6xthtq/

Affected Motherboards

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ASUS’ motherboard product page lists 16 SKUs of motherboards with a Q-Release Slim mechanism (listed below). These product lines that may feature the Q-Release Slim include: ROG STRIX Z890/B850/X870, ROG MAXIMUS Z890/Z790, TUF GAMING Z890 (only one), and a Pro WS WRX90E (only one).

• Important note – not every motherboard from the above product lines feature the Q-release Slim, sometimes this feature depends on the SKU from that product line.

1. ROG STRIX Z890-H GAMING WIFI
2. ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO BTF
3. ROG STRIX B850-I GAMING WIFI
4. ROG STRIX Z890-I GAMING WIFI
5. ROG MAXIMUS Z890 APEX
6. ROG STRIX Z890-F GAMING WIFI
7. ROG STRIX Z890-E GAMING WIFI
8. ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO
9. ROG MAXIMUS Z890 EXTREME
10. ROG STRIX Z890-A GAMING WIFI
11. TUF GAMING Z890-PRO WIFI
12. ROG STRIX X870-I GAMING WIFI
13. ROG STRIX X870-A GAMING WIFI
14. ROG STRIX X870E-E GAMING WIFI
15. ROG MAXIMUS Z790 HERO BTF
16. Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE

Source: https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/all-series/filter?Series=PRIME,ProArt,Workstation,ROG-Republic-of-Gamers,TUF-Gaming,CSM,Business,Others

ASUS Manual Documentation

ASUS’ documentation for using the Q-Release Slim is shown above, stating:

“To release an expansion card on a Q-Release Slim PCIe slot: Pull the front end of the expansion card upwards, this should release the expansion card from the Q-Release Slim PCIe slot, allowing you to remove the expansion card from the Q-Release Slim PCIe slot,” along with a reference illustration. In their most recent press release, Asus noted a "2 degree angle" in an illustration.

Source: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1851/ROG_MAXIMUS_Z890_HERO/E25755_ROG_MAXIMUS_Z890_HERO_EM_V4_WEB.pdf?model=ROG%20MAXIMUS%20Z890%20HERO

Brief History of Q-Release Slim

ASUS first released the Q-Release Slim version on August 20th, 2024, and showcased it at Gamescon 2024, making it a relatively new feature. This came after their original Q-Release mechanism that they unveiled in 2021.

Source:

https://press.asus.com/news/press-releases/asus-x870e-x870-motherboards-ryzen-9000/
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/asus-and-msi-debut-motherboards-with-gpu-quick-release-for-easy-upgrades

Issues with Slight Angle

Found via PCWorld, Andreas Schilling of HardwareLuxx posted on Bluesky saying, “I have made a schematic drawing of what the problem is in my case. It is not always possible to create the necessary angle because of the back of the case,” along with this picture (below).

At the time of writing this, ASUS has not responded to issues with creating the necessary angle to use the Q-Release Slim mechanism.

In a February 5 tweet, Uniko’s Hardware showcased an example of more noteworthy damage to a user’s video card. The tweet reads: “we further dig in the photos provided by affected asus users. about the extreme cases reported, actually not just the peg part are damaged but also the corner of the x16 part. we all know the metal piece of q release slim is at the peg side only so the scratches that happened on the x16 part make zero sense. thus we are now suspect the root cause of the problem is the metal between x16 and peg which is intended to be soldered to PCB for smt slot rigidity. our initial test of 60 times plugging and removal shows almost no damage on the x16 part of the PCB, so if you follow tight the asus official guide, the extent of the damage could be minimized.”

It included this image:

Source: 

https://bsky.app/profile/aschilling.bsky.social/post/3lgwux6ikb22j
https://x.com/unikoshardware/status/1887113682200707194/photo/1

Simple Recap

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• ASUS’ Q-Release Slim mechanism appears to be causing damage to the GPU’s PCIe-connector.
  • ASUS currently lists 16 SKUs of motherboards that use Q-Release Slim. This feature came out at the end of August 2024.
• Ultimately, it is pretty hard to notice the damage caused, until around 60 or so installs/removals (as highlighted by Uniko’s Hardware testing video). However, you may be able to notice extremely minor damage to the inside corner of the PEG power connector after every removal.
  • It is extremely hard to tell if Uniko’s Hardware perfectly followed ASUS' guidelines for removal, but it also should not be a requirement to perfectly follow the precise angle to the degree. We think that removing a video card is a standard process that should not require new care just for this mechanism. ASUS documentation says: “To release an expansion card on a Q-Release Slim PCIe slot: Pull the front end of the expansion card upwards, this should release the expansion card from the Q-Release Slim PCIe slot, allowing you to remove the expansion card from the Q-Release Slim PCIe slot,” which Uniko’s Hardware did follow, however in their most recent release, ASUS highlighted a 2 degree angle, which we’re not sure if Uniko’s Hardware did on every removal. But this also shouldn’t matter.
• ASUS' most recent press release acknowledges the issue, but claims this is only cosmetic damage to the GPU PCIe-connector (motherboard unaffected) that will not impact the performance or card functionality. 
• When asked about warranty claims, the ASUS representative said this shouldn’t affect warranty coverage.
  • “We note that if there is an issue caused by the Q-Release Slim slot, we'll take care of end-users in the North America region. I make that distinction because I cover only the NA region,” and “In addition to some level of wear by inserting and removing the card, you can also slightly scratch the gold fingers when you miss the slot or set it down on a rough surface, etc. But this kind of wear doesn't typically damage the card in a way that prevents it from normal operation, and purely cosmetic scratches shouldn't void warranty.”
    • Because it’s the GPUs that are damaged, and not the motherboard, we wonder how much authority ASUS has for speaking on warranties for other manufacturers.
• ASUS noted there were no reported issues on the original Q-Release (non-slim) mechanism, making it seem like they possibly overcomplicated things by trying to advance the design.
• Andreas Schilling of HardwareLuxx posted on Bluesky saying, “I have made a schematic drawing of what the problem is in my case. It is not always possible to create the necessary angle because of the back of the case,” along with a picture illustrating the angle issue.
• Ultimately, it seems that this isn’t a large issue because it only causes minor cosmetic damage that will not affect performance of the card and shouldn’t affect the warranty. Our biggest concern is if ASUS rejects warranties. We’d also be concerned if a video card dies for some unrelated reason, then the user gets rejected for PCIe damage caused by ASUS. This is something we can’t account for until it happens.
• As a bonus, most end users will likely not install/remove their card 60 times anyway. This is likely a much bigger issue for reviewers/testers.

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Phanteks is Back: Eclipse G400A High Airflow Case Review & Thermal Benchmarksjimmy_thang February 3, 2025

We analyze the Phanteks Eclipse G400A’s specs, build quality, thermals, and more

The Highlights

• The Phanteks Eclipse G400A uses wide-spacing mesh for the front panel coupled with a finer dust filter behind it
• The case’s biggest downside is that there's no official front radiator compatibility
• With 4 included 140mm fans, the G400A is a good case at a good price
• Original MSRP: $110
• Release Date: December 10, 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today we’re reviewing the Phanteks Eclipse G400A. It’s $110 and includes 4x 140mm fans that are met with a swooping inlet to try and prevent recirculation and funnel the air clean into the case. Phanteks is using wide-spacing mesh for the front panel with a finer dust filter behind it, doubling-up on mesh in a way that can hurt performance; however, there’s a lot of space between the filter and the front panel, which helps avoid issues introduced by pressure drop. 
The front mount only officially supports 140mm fans. It helps that these are included, and while this does limit front mount support for radiators, forcing a specific fan can help performance. We saw Lian Li do this with its new Lian Li Lancool 207. Eliminating support for 120mm fans means reducing the amount of metal and railing obstructing intake of a 140, so this should be the ideal approach for cooling.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 22, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera, Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The case is also elevated a lot, which will help with bottom intake (like for the PSU). That ground clearance is important. The lower side panel is a ventilated strip that’s intended to feed PSU shroud-top fans, although the porosity is relatively low.

Overall, Phanteks is aiming to compete in the airflow and performance market with this case.

Phanteks Eclipse G400A Specs

Model No.	PH-EC400GA_DBK01
UPC Code	886523303558
Case Dimensions	495 x 230 x 522 mm | 19.5 x 9.05 x 20.55 in
Form Factor	Mid-tower
Mainboard Support	*E-ATX | ATX | Micro-ATX | Mini-ITX *Up to 280 mm wide
Materials	Steel chassis | Tempered glass
Side Window	Yes
PCI Slots	7
Vertical GPU Support	3-slots Riser Cable sold separately
Internal 2.5″ Bay	2 + 1x 3.5″ HDD
Internal 3.5″ Bay	2 + 0x 2.5″ SSD
Front I/O	1x USB 3.0 1x USB-C 3.0 Gen2 Microphone | Headphone Combo Reset button Power button + LED
Fans 120 | 140	Total Fans: 7x | 6x Top: 3x | 2x Front: – | 3x (3x 140 Pre-Installed) Side: – | – Rear: 1x | 1x (1x 140 Pre-Installed) Bottom: 3x | –
Radiators 120 | 140	Top: Max. 360 | 280 Front: – | – Rear: 120 | – Bottom: – | –
CPU Cooler Height	184 mm | 7.24 in
GPU Length	415 mm | 16.33 in
GPU Width	184 mm | 7.24 in
Power Supply Length	270 mm | 10.60 in
Top Radiator Length x Width x Height	360 Radiator: 415 x 138 x 60 mm | 16.33 x 5.43 x 2.36 in 280 Radiator: 360 x 147 x 65 mm | 14.17 x 5.78 x 2.55 in
Rear Radiator Length x Width	170 x 132 mm | 6.69 x 5.19 in
Net Weight	8.63 kg | 19.02 lbs
Gross Weight	10.50 kg | 23.14 lbs
Warranty	5 Years limited
Scope of Delivery	1x Eclipse G400A chassis 4x M25G2-140 fans (Pre-installed) 1x D-RGB mainboard adapter
Accessory Box	30x Zip ties 4x Screw cover corner L 4x Screw cover corner R 4x Screw cover bridge
Screws	18x Mainboard | SSD screws 4x Power supply screws 8x HDD screws 12x 30 mm fan screws 1x Mainboard stand-off 1x Stand-off removal tool 1x Extra R-side panel screw

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

Overview

The Phanteks Eclipse G400A has been a long time coming. Back in early 2016 we were initially unimpressed by the Phanteks Eclipse P400 (watch our review) with the solid panel, but we had a more positive opinion of the airflow-focused P400A (D-RGB) in 2019 (watch our review). With a launch MSRP of $90 and three stock fans behind a simple mesh front panel, the P400A remained a strong competitor in price-to-performance for years after its launch. Over those years, Phanteks has incrementally updated other Eclipse cases from P to G versions, but it's held off on the most important model for so long that some of the updated G cases are now end-of-life. Finally, though, the G400A is here, and we can see whether it's a worthy successor at $110.

Key competition to the G400A includes the Lian Li Lancool 207 that we reviewed recently, which takes on a similar approach to design and can currently be bought for around $80. There’s also the new Corsair FRAME 4000D, which we have in for testing already and are working on. We’ll cover the other competition as we work through this review.

The Build

Getting into the build quality and assembly notes first:

The G400A's front panel diverges from the formula that made its predecessor so successful: the P400A just had a sheet of mesh with no additional filtration, while the G400A uses "brick pattern" mesh (with larger rectangular holes) backed by a filter. 

Phanteks advertises that the mesh is now 45% open surface, versus 32% for what Phanteks calls "standard mesh." We’re not sure exactly what “standard” means. 

Both the mesh and filter are magnetic, and the filter can be removed without altering the appearance of the case; we'll test that later on. The filter has plenty of clearance (>2cm away from the intake fans), but it's one of the saggiest we've ever seen. On the plus side, the lack of reinforcement means that nothing blocks the LED lighting and nothing blocks the intake. 

Phanteks has also revealed a G400N variant with two tempered glass panels and more elaborate cable management, but that version hasn't yet been released.

The front panel includes a plastic frame that's shaped around the 3x 140mm ARGB infinity mirror fans. The choice to only support 140s in the front is in contrast to the P400A, which had more front mounting options, as well as a cheaper non-Digital variant for customers who wanted to use their own fans.

The uniquely-shaped plastic frame might help to keep air from recirculating through the front fans, but the fans are already sealed against the metal chassis. 

According to Phanteks it "directs airflow [and] reduces turbulence." 

The front fans are uniquely joined into a single unit, which could be useful in some contexts. In the G400A, there unfortunately isn't enough room to easily take all three fans out in one piece while a system is inside the case. In situations where that’s not possible, the remaining benefit of the uni-fan approach is that the front fans are daisy-chained together, sharing a single ARGB and fan header. All of the fans have Phanteks "LINK6" connectors and need adapters to connect to standard fan and ARGB headers, which may limit how reusable they are for future builds.

The G400A's focus on shroud ventilation with a two-part glass and mesh side panel is similar to some Antec and Lian Li cases we've covered, but in particular, the Lancool 207. The 207 also has infinity mirror fans and a similar magnetic front panel, but we saw both the 207 and the G400A at Computex, so they were likely in development in isolation and at the same time. 

The G400A has 3x 120mm mounting locations atop the shroud, but at least one of these is of limited usefulness due to the presence of the rear-mounted PSU. The biggest difference with the 207 is that it moves the PSU forward to make way for cooling with clear outside access directly into the GPU. 

The 207 led two categories in our Best PC Cases for 2024 roundup, and it's a tough act to follow with a steady price of $80 on Amazon. The G400A differentiates itself through its larger size and more conventional layout, which gives it an advantage over the 207 in cable management (our biggest complaint with the 207). The suggested routing from Phanteks' manual worked well even with our large sleeved cables, although we opted to route the GPU through the shroud. If you install fans on top of the shroud, that's not an option. The removable section of the top panel and roomy upper area makes working with EPS12V cables for the CPU and other connectors at the top of the motherboard easy. The G400A also supports motherboards with rear-mount connectors; Phanteks specifically mentions BTF and Project Zero boards as compatible.

Surprisingly, the G400A doesn't have better radiator support in any meaningful way than the 207. The shroud cutout at the front of the G400A doesn't leave room for radiators, and although it might technically be possible to force a 280mm rad in, it's not officially supported. Headroom at the top of the case is excellent with more than 7cm of clearance from the top edge of the motherboard to the roof, and the removable top mesh panel makes the top fan mount easy to access for installing radiators up to 360mm. 

The whole top of the case is also technically removable, although doing so requires removing 15 screws. Even though it’s kind of a pain to remove, we like the additional access without losing rigidity of the overall frame. This optional feature can help with maintenance and installation. 

But as far as radiators, we don't generally recommend trying to fit 360mm open-loop radiators in the case (as opposed to a CLC) since the fittings will come close to the stock fans. It’s doable, but will require more effort than typical for custom loops.

There are some minor quality-of-life issues that aren't unusual for cases in this price range:

The top mesh section is a little stiff and difficult to grab, the steel side panel has to be pressed down on all sides to slide into place and could be executed better. The PSU filter unfortunately ejects from the rear of the case, meaning that pulling it away from a wall will be necessary in most situations. The only construction problem was an improperly installed rivet inside the drive cage, but the cage still worked fine. 

Drive support is adequate but bare-bones, limited to either 2x 3.5" drives or 2x 2.5" drives and 1x 3.5" drive. There's no built-in vibration damping, and Phanteks didn't bother cutting extra slots for moving the cage to any alternate locations.

Phanteks Eclipse G400A Thermal Benchmarks

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As well as running our usual suite of tests on the G400A, we went back and ran the P400A, as well as the G400A without its front filter in order to match the older case. The obvious competitor to watch in these charts is the significantly cheaper Lancool 207, but the NZXT H5 Flow 2024 is a close match to the G400A in both price and layout. Antec's Flux (non-Pro) with five stock fans is similar as well at $120, although we haven't tested that model. Let’s get into the benchmarks.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

The first test is for noise-normalized thermals on the GPU.

With the four stock case fans slowed to hit our noise-normalized target of 27 dBA SPL, the G400A made a good start with an average GPU temperature of 45 degrees Celsius above ambient compared to the P400A's average of 49 degrees. That's near the middle of our chart, but many of the cases above it required aftermarket fans (HAVN HS420, O11D EVO side intake) or are from a higher price tier. The most relevant exception is the Lancool 207, which averaged 42 degrees above ambient in this test with its direct GPU cooling. The Lancool 207 was built for this and shows advantages in cooling. The Antec C8 (read our review) also does well here, though is a larger dual-chamber style.

The G400A isn’t exceptional, but is average to above average for GPU cooling.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Moving to CPU thermals in the same noise normalized test, the G400A again outperformed its predecessor at 41 degrees above ambient for the average all-core temperature and 45 on the P-cores versus 46 all-core and 50 P-core on the P400A. It's encouraging to see that one of the better-cooled cases we'd reviewed as of late 2019 has been outperformed by a decent selection of new cases. The G400A effectively tied the 207 here (as well as the more expensive Antec Flux Pro) without a solid lead in either all-core or P-core averages. Both cases are good here.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

The G400A is quiet for the level of CPU cooling that it provides at 100% fan speed, with an all-core average of 39 degrees above ambient at 37 dBA while some similarly-performing cases like the Torrent (watch our review) and North XL (read our review) are significantly louder. That includes the 41.6 dBA Lancool 207, which still tops the chart but is less than two degrees ahead of the G400A, yet is noticeably louder.

Removing the front filter had barely any effect on thermal performance, so we recommend leaving it in place unless the sagging causes problems.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Full Speed

Taking a quick glance at the GPU thermals under full load and at max fan speeds, we can see that removing the filter also had minimal effect here. As long as it's kept clean, leaving this filter installed shouldn't hurt.

GPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

Our standardized fan test uses the same set of three fans in every case, which is useful here for comparing the ventilation of the P400A and G400A while removing stock fans as a variable. The G400A shows definite improvement, with an average GPU temperature of 49 degrees above ambient versus 52 degrees on the original P400A. 

Neither of the Phanteks cases perform well versus the rest of this chart, but you should plan to keep the G400A's stock fans, so its performance without those stock fans isn't particularly relevant.

CPU Full Load Thermals - Standardized Fans

In the same standardized fan test, CPU thermals improved from 41 degrees above ambient all-core in the P400A down to 38 degrees for the G400A. It seems like Phanteks has managed to improve cooling not just through brute force, but also through panel design, while not sacrificing dust filtration.

VRM & RAM Full Load Thermals - Noise-Normalized

Circling back to the original noise normalized results, the G400A had excellent VRM thermals at 28 degrees above ambient, near both the Lancool 207 and Flux Pro (read our review) at 27 degrees. Memory temperatures were similarly good. This may be due to the G400A's high ceiling in combination with the four 140mm fans that provide airflow up to the very top of the case.

Phanteks Eclipse G400A Conclusion

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In comparison to the older P400A, the G400A is a solid improvement in thermal performance and it keeps most of the feel and stylings of a Phanteks case. In our original review, we concluded that "given a choice we much prefer a single layer of perforated metal to a decorative mesh panel backed by a foam or fabric filter." That's still generally true, but Phanteks deserves credit for building a case with a filter that doesn't significantly hinder airflow.

The G400A is a good case at a good price, but it's hard for anyone to compete against the Lancool 207. Phanteks' advantage is that the G400A is a bit larger, and therefore it fits slightly larger components. It definitely has more cable space than the 207, for example, with cable management really being our only big complaint with the 207.

Phanteks committed fully to the stock fans that it includes with the G400A, which we agree with for the most part. The biggest downside is that there's no front radiator compatibility, although it might be possible to get a 280mm rad installed.

At $110 with the 4 included 140mm fans, the case is overall competitive. It’s pretty good in terms of ease of installation. The removable top is nice, though it is a bit of a pain to remove it. 

If you like the G400A and just wanted to read a review to look for any problems, we’d say go for it. Just keep in mind any size limitations as it’s a little smaller for an ATX case. But if it’s within your budget and you like it more than the Lian Li Lancool 207, we think the G400A is a well-executed Phanteks case. It’s good to see that the company is back in a good way.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition Review & Benchmarks vs 5090, 7900 XTX, 4080, & Morejimmy_thang January 31, 2025

We test the RTX 5080’s thermals, frequency, gaming benchmarks, ray tracing, power efficiency, and more

The Highlights

• The RTX 5080’s performance is within striking distance of AMD’s RX 7900 XTX
• At the low end, we saw only a 7-10% performance uplift from the 5080 over the 4080
• The RTX 5090 performs 30% to 68.9% better than the RTX 5080 at 4K in our tests
• Original MSRP: $1,000
• Release Date: January 30, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

We’re going to provide the bottom-line up front: The NVIDIA RTX 5090 (Be mindful of scalped prices) is anywhere from 30% to 68.9% better than the RTX 5080 (Be mindful of scalped prices) at 4K, depending on game, with results commonly in the 45-55% range. Against the AMD RX 7900 XTX of similar price, the 5080 (Be mindful of scalped prices) is within striking distance. They are commonly within 10% of each other. As for the generational gain of the 5080 vs. the 4080, it depends on the game. We saw 16%-20% in some tests, but we also had several results as low as 7-10%, which is about as boring as possible. 

There’s a ton more nuance to get into, but that gives you some expectations in case you got what you needed and want to dip out. One of the more interesting tests we’ll be getting into though will be efficiency, where the RTX 5080 ends up potentially making a case for itself more than the power-hungry 5090 did. Its lower power budget helps there. The thermal testing is also interesting, considering the 5080 FE drops to paste rather than liquid metal and also makes changes to the heatsink itself.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 29, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Testing, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione

Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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We’re keeping this review really simple and short (by our standards) today. 

First up, we have to disclose some office gambling behind the scenes. Jimmy has bet Jeremy that if the 5080 can beat the 4090 (Be mindful of scalped prices) at any one benchmark, he’s going to get some free tater tots. 

RTX 5080 Pricing

We’ll quickly cover pricing.

The NVIDIA RTX 5080 has an MSRP of $1,000 and launches on January 30th, along with the $2,000 MSRP RTX 5090. 

The 5070 Ti at $750 and 5070 at $550 will follow in February. Pre-launch pricing on Best Buy indicates that MSRP options will be slim outside of the NVIDIA Founders Edition, so adjust your personal value assessment based on what they actually show up for on launch day. The most expensive one we can see right now is $1,400 – and we’d say don’t buy that one.

The previous generation RTX 4080 launched at $1,200 (watch our review) following the infamous “unlaunch” of the “4080 12GB” – which actually became the 4070 Ti (Be mindful of scalped prices). More recently, the 4080 Super (Be mindful of scalped prices) launched at $1,000, providing a value increase despite its nearly indistinguishable performance from the base 4080.

AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the closest price competition for the 5080, which currently starts as low as $830 but is more commonly around $930. Down from that is the 7900 XT, ranging from $650 to $710 and in a decidedly lower price bracket. AMD says its 9070 series cards will be arriving in March.

Intel GPUs haven’t scaled up to this market category yet – that’s a hopeful “yet,” for the record.

Overview

And now for a quick overview of the basic specs. For the full details, check out our announcement coverage of these cards.

The Blackwell architecture-based RTX 5080 has 10752 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus. These specs are way down from the 5090’s configuration – almost exactly half – making for probably the biggest gap there’s ever been between the top 2 tiers on launch day.

The RTX 5080 is also a PCIe Gen5 card, but as our recent PCIe scaling benchmark with the 5090 showed, it barely makes a difference at all in games to run on Gen4 – or even Gen3.

This review will again focus on high-end GPUs, and you can see our test methodology here. As a reminder, our site is free of third-party ads and contains our game settings and test bench. To see the low-end, check out our Intel Arc B570 review.

RTX 5080 Thermals

Here’s the thermal chart.

Under a full workload for the GPU, the RTX 5080’s temperature with auto settings landed at 65-66 degrees Celsius for the GPU. Considering the change to thermal paste from liquid metal, the real impact here to reduce the temperature is in the power consumption reduction. We’ll look at RPM as well, though.

The memory temperature plotted at about 72-75 degrees Celsius for the 5080, which is well within the TjMax restrictions of the memory on the card, which should be about 105 degrees for that.

As for 5080 fan speed, it held about 1,470-1,500 RPM. That makes its acoustic profile similar to what we saw in the 5090 review, so you can check that for noise samples and a frequency spectrum. It’s a little quieter overall.

The 5090’s GPU temperature in this test was 72 degrees Celsius, with the 5090’s memory at 90 -- we weren’t happy about that, despite being within spec. Once in a hotbox case, that 90 degree result becomes a concern. Finally, the 5090’s fan ran about 100 RPM higher when left to its own devices, resulting in a 5080 FE, which despite moving away from liquid metal is not really at a disadvantage. It’s doing okay overall, especially because of the fact that the power consumption is down. 

RTX 5080 Frequency

Frequency validation is up now. This is just to ensure the card is hitting at least the spec set by NVIDIA.

The RTX 5080 clocks in this benchmark held relatively flat, although not perfectly flat, at around 2670 MHz. NVIDIA’s website claims 2.62 GHz boost clock, so it is technically exceeding the minimum spec.

The RTX 4080 ran at about 2775 MHz in this benchmark, consistent with what we saw between the 5090 and 4090 (watch our review). The frequency is higher on the 4080, but the architecture has changed and made this an indirect comparison.

The RTX 5090 bounces around between 2475 to 2670 MHz or so, mostly landing below the 5080. It’s relatively common for the fuller configurations to run lower clocks, but higher core counts.

RTX 5080 Gaming Benchmarks

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Time to get into game testing. We’ll keep these short this time since the comparison is relatively simple.

FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 14 is up first and at 4K.

The RTX 5080 landed at 112 FPS AVG, behind the RTX 4090’s 139 FPS AVG result and the 5090’s 182 FPS AVG result. That makes the 5090 faster than the 5080 by a massive 62%. 

AMD’s 7900 XTX directly competes with the 5080, but does allow the 5080 a lead of just under 10 FPS in this benchmark. Lows are about the same between them.

Against the 4080 and 4080 Super, the 5080 is about 15% better.

Generationally by name, the 3080 (watch our review) held a 71 FPS AVG in this benchmark, yielding a 58% uplift to the 5080. The 2080 Ti’s (watch our review) 54 FPS AVG gets basically doubled by the 5080.

As a note, some of these charts have the 1070 (watch our review), 1060 (watch our revisit), 2060 (watch our review), and other older cards on them. The 1080 Ti (watch our revisit) hasn’t been rerun yet this year.

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5080 held 217 FPS AVG against the 5090’s 317 FPS AVG. We’re not fully CPU-bound here, so the 5090 still has relatively high scaling at 46% ahead of the 5080. For the same comparison, the 4090 led the 4080 original by 36% and the Super by basically the same because they’re basically the same card.

The 7900 XTX (watch our review) remains neck-and-neck with the RTX 5080, with the two functionally identical from a player experience standpoint. The 5080 is technically ahead. The 7900 XTX is the strongest competition to the 5080 in this rasterized test when looking at pricing.

The 4080 and 4080 Super improve from about 200 FPS AVG to 217, or a relatively boring 8-9%.

Down the stack, we have the 7900 XT at 171 FPS AVG, the 4070 Ti at 151 FPS AVG, and the 6950 XT at 150 FPS AVG. The generational comparison to the 3080’s 129 FPS AVG gives the 5080 a 68% improvement, a bit better than observed at 4K.

FFXIV 1080p

Finally for Final Fantasy, 1080p has the 5090 at that same impressive 407 FPS number we mentioned last week, with the 5080 at 302 FPS AVG. Despite the heavier CPU load, the advantage remains 35% for the 5090 over the 5080; still, that’s nothing compared to what we saw at 4K.

The 4090 leads the 5080 by 24%, at 376 FPS AVG to 302. The 7900 XTX is closer than ever to the 5080 and is tied in all practical senses. It’s looking good here, especially with the price, but this ignores ray tracing testing that tends to still favor NVIDIA.

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is up next, tested first at 4K and rasterized. This is a heavy workload for these cards, with the RTX 5090 at 86 FPS AVG and holding strong frametime pacing as indicated by the 1% and 0.1% lows. The RTX 4090 is next (at 67 FPS), followed by the RTX 5080 at 58 FPS AVG. This has the 4090 as 16% better than the 5080 and the 5090 as 48% better than the 5080.

The RTX 4080 Super (read our review) and 4080 are functionally identical and give the 5080 an underwhelming 6 FPS lead, which is about 12%. The 5080 also leads the 7900 XTX by 17%, with AMD’s card falling disproportionally behind in this test with its 49 FPS result. Lows on the 7900 XTX are commendable though and show impressive consistency.

Strong prior-gen cards include the 3090 Ti (watch our review) at 45 FPS AVG and 3080 at 36.6 FPS AVG, with the 3080 yielding an uplift of 57% to the RTX 5080 and similar for the 6950 XT (read our review).

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 leads the chart at 130 FPS AVG, making it 23% better than the 4090 and 34% better than the RTX 5080. 

The 5080 and 4080 are disappointingly close at only a 9% improvement for the 5080. The lead over the 7900 XTX also reduces down to 13% here, with lower resolution drawing them closer.

Noteworthy other cards include the 3090 Ti at 74 FPS AVG, the 7900 XT (read our revisit) at 71 FPS AVG (which isn’t bad considering its price at various points in history), the 3080 at 62 FPS AVG, and the 2080 Ti at 45 FPS AVG.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

Scaling continued at 1080p, where the 5090 boosts to 160 FPS average from the 130 FPS result at 1440p. The RTX 5080 still trails the 4090, but they get close and the 4090’s advantage is reduced to 6%. 

Generationally, the 5080 leads the 4080 by 7%, down from its lead of 9% at 1440p and 12% at 4K. The 7900 XTX still trails by about 10 FPS here. It’s a shame that AMD decided not to compete at the high-end this generation, as a generational step over the current XTX may have been a serious contender to the 5080. There’s still time though.

Starfield - 4K

Starfield is up at 4K. First, we have to address this absolute roast of a comment from our 5090 review. “I would like to correct one mistake GN made in this review, where they stated that there aren’t many reasons to play Starfield at 1080p but in actuality there aren’t many reasons to play this game at all.”

Ouch. Well, anyway, at 4K, the RTX 5090 held 108 FPS AVG and led the 5080 by 41%. Not the best we’ve seen, but still a large gap. For reference, the 4090’s 92 FPS AVG led the 4080’s 71 FPS by 30%. Comparatively, that makes the gap between the last generation 90 and 80-class cards smaller than the current generation.

Against the 4080, the 5080 is about 5 FPS improved. That’s not very exciting. NVIDIA’s angle will probably be pricing.

The 7900 XTX actually defeats the 5080 on a technicality in this one as well, with frametime pacing equivalent between them and the average FPS functionally identical. There is no perceptible difference between these, which is a benefit to the 7900 XTX in this rasterized scenario.

Starfield - 1440p

At 1440p, the 5090 climbs to 147 FPS AVG and leads the 5080’s 110 FPS result by 34%. That reduces the lead versus 4K. The 7900 XTX also climbs with a very slight but irrelevant victory over the 5080, with the lows identical when rounded. 

Against the nearly perfectly matched 4080 and 4080 Super, the 5080 holds an unimpressive 2.5% lead. That’s not very exciting.

Older cards worth highlighting include the 3080 FTW3 (RIP EVGA) at 72 FPS and 2080 Ti at 50 FPS AVG. AMD’s 7900 XT is also noteworthy for its performance when considering some of its historical pricing.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the RTX 5080’s 132 FPS AVG gives the 4090 a lead of 17% and the 5090 a lead of 24%. The 5080 matches the 4080 equally here, with the 4080 Super within error -- just like its entire pointless existence, sort of like Starfield at 1080p.

The XTX also nearly equals the 5080, although NVIDIA has an advantage on a technicality.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up now, first at 4K rasterized.

The RTX 5090 ran at 133 FPS AVG and held well-paced lows behind it. Its lead over the 4090’s 98 FPS is 35% here, with the lead over the 5080 at 57%. This is one of the largest gaps thus far. For comparison, the 4090 led the 4080 non-Super by 36%, meaning that the 4090 and 4080 were closer together than the 5090 and 5080 are to each other.

The 7900 XTX’s 77 FPS AVG has it outperforming the 4080 cards and behind the 5080 card, which leads by 10%.

The 3080 did OK in this test at 50 FPS AVG, with a 71% improvement to the 5080.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

1440p has the RTX 5080 at 134 FPS AVG, achieving 71% of the performance of the RTX 5090 at about 50% of the price. The RTX 4090 leads the 5080 again, this time by around 20 FPS.

As for AMD, the 7900 XTX lands at 126 FPS AVG for a 10 FPS gap between the two cards. The 4080 lands at 122 FPS AVG, keeping the 5080 at 10% ahead.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

1080p has the cards crushed together, although there’s still a gap of 49 FPS between the 5090 and 5080. That’s 30%, which is a lot for 1080p, but this isn’t necessarily a scenario to plan for.

The RTX 4080 is right next to the 5080. Although the gap is 10 FPS average, the reality is that very few people would notice 165 FPS vs. 156 FPS, particularly in this game.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty

This is where we would test Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty -- if it worked. We’ve had repeated issues with getting the 50-series cards to run Cyberpunk without some sort of game-level issue occurring where it just won’t launch or crashes. We had this with the 5090, but reinstalled the game and that fixed it. We can’t state for certain that it is a fault of the 50-series cards and not some other game update, especially as Cyberpunk has had so many problems over the years, but what we can say is that it continuously kept breaking. We removed it from this review until the game is more stable. Again, we’re not sure if it’s unique to these cards or not, but we know that Jay had similar issues in his testing.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

Dying Light 2 at 4K is next. The 5080 ran at 81 FPS AVG, giving the 4090 a 13% lead and the 5090 a 56% lead. That’s a large improvement for the 5090 over the 5080. The 4090 improved over the 4080 by less, at 36% here.

The 5080 leads the 7900 XTX by 12% here, with the 7900 XTX’s 73 FPS AVG result landing between the 5080 and 4080. Speaking of, the 5080 leads the 4080 cards by about 21%.

We’re seeing large gains from the 3080 to the 5080, as expected, with the 2080 Ti below even the 3080.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5080’s 149 FPS AVG puts it close to the 7900 XTX’s 141, with lows between them also comparable. The 5080 is advantaged, but that gap was larger at 4K. The 5090 also has its lead cut down to 45%; although still significant, the doubled price with the 5090 jeopardizes its value for anyone not using it in VRAM-intensive work scenarios.

The 4080 cards were again almost identical, re-proving why we didn’t waste our time in that review. The 5080 leads them by 12%.

Dying Light 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the 5090 led the 5080 by 44%, which is really more impressive for the 9800X3D (read our review) than anything else. That is a gigantic gap when considering how any prior CPU we’ve used for these benches would be bottlenecking the top 2-3 cards. The 4090 also maintains a lead of 19% over the 5080. 

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

In Resident Evil 4 at 4K, the RTX 5080 fell behind the 7900 XTX by 4 FPS. Lows are about the same, but advantaged on the 7900 XTX. The 5090’s lead over the 5080 is massive in this one, at 68.9% with these settings. That’s a huge gulf. Looking back, the 4090 led the 4080 by 47%. There are two main ways to look at this: One, the 5090 is just that good; two, the 5080 is just that unimpressive.

To figure out which it is, we can compare the 5080 to the 4080. The improvement here is 19%. NVIDIA’s best argument for itself will be the price as compared to the original 4080. The 7900 XTX wins that argument in this particular game, though.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the advantage in the 5090 over the 5080 is reduced to 56%, though that’s still a lot. The 4090 is still more than 50 frames per second faster than the 5080, with the 7900 XTX now 4% ahead. That’s not a huge gap, but considering the generational difference and price of the XTX, we remain disappointed that AMD has signaled it likely won’t launch a replacement this generation. Maybe they’ll reconsider.

The 5080’s lead over the 4080 drops to just 11% here.

RTX 5080 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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We’re on to ray tracing testing now.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is up first, with a caveat that this game is unbelievably NVIDIA favored. We have other RT tests that are more balanced, but this is one of the heaviest workloads and also happens to benefit NVIDIA. Cyberpunk would also fit that bill, but we removed it for the stability issues we mentioned.

At 4K with FSR as defined in the chart title, the 5090 held 88 FPS AVG, the 4090 ran at 65 FPS AVG, and the 5080 ran at 59 FPS AVG. That sets a 15% lead over the 4080 FE’s 51 FPS AVG. 

Some notables: The 3080 just can’t really handle these settings and is down at 28 FPS AVG. Jumping to the 4080 from the 3080 would be an 83% improvement, with the 5080 giving an uplift of 112% total from the 3080.

Sadly, the 7900 XTX is worse than the 3080 in this benchmark.

As for the 5090, it ran 51% higher framerate than the 5080 with these conditions. Sadly for Jimmy, the 5080 did not defeat the 4090 here -- but there’s hope.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong 1080p

At 1080p but still with the same FSR settings, the 5080 operated at 122 FPS AVG and -- what’s that? -- the 5080 outperforms the 4090 in this one by 1.5 FPS AVG. No one said the win had to be meaningful and a win is a win -- and as soon as I reported the results, I heard they were considering a rematch with the 5070.

The 5080 roughly matches the 4090 in this result, with the 5090 leading the 5080 by 30%. The 1080p restriction with FSR is what’s making this less exciting than typically.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 with RT is up next. This one is more balanced.

The RTX 5090 at 4K ran at 113 FPS AVG with maximum RT, which puts it 33% over the 4090 and 57% over the 5080. The 7900 XTX is much more competitive in this one than Black Myth, running at 66 FPS AVG and landing between the 4080 Super and 5080.

The generational uplift is 16% from the 4080 FE to the 5080 FE. 

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

At 1440p and still with RT, the 5080 held about a 7% lead over the 7900 XTX. That’s not bad for AMD’s last gen card in this game. As for the 4080 FE, the 5080 is about 10% ahead. Not very exciting for NVIDIA overall with the 5080 in this one. Let’s move on.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 5080’s 146 FPS AVG had it only about 9 FPS over the 4080. The 5090 still keeps a 33% lead over the 5080, despite slimming down versus the 4K result’s 57% gap.

This isn’t that interesting, so let’s skip ahead.

Ray Tracing: Dying Light 2 4K

With ray tracing for Dying Light 2 and tested at 4K and upscaling, the RTX 5080 ran at 67 FPS AVG and trailed the 4090 by over 10 FPS, with the 5090 leading the 5080 by 63%. 

Over the 4080, the 5080 leads by about 17%. The 7900 XTX is between the 3090 Ti and 4070 Ti (watch our review), trailing the 4080, and obviously therefore trailing the 5080.

Ray Tracing: Dying Light 2 1440p

At 1440p with RT and upscaling, the 5080’s 117 FPS AVG lands it 12% ahead of the 4080. The gap is shrinking here. The 7900 XTX trails somewhat significantly here and gives the 5080 an advantage of 35%.

Ray Tracing: Dying Light 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 5090 proves that there’s still headroom in the CPU (impressively) with its 224 FPS AVG, leading the 5080 by 41%, but the 4080 and 5080 get squished together with only a 9% advantage to the 5080 between them.

The 7900 XTX is closer to the 3090 Ti here, keeping the 5080 about 30% ahead.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 4K

Finally for RT, Resident Evil 4 at 4K with upscaling is up. The RTX 5090 ran at 210 FPS AVG with these settings, or a 54% improvement over the 5080’s 136. The 7900 XTX is much more competitive here, with the title generally being a lightweight RT implementation. We keep it around for that reason: If we have a heavy one like Black Myth, it helps to balance representation with a light one. The 7900 XTX looks much better here than in other RT tests.

The 4080’s 117-119 FPS AVG makes the scaling in the 5080 overall boring, unfortunately, with the improvement being hardly noticeable.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 1440p

Here’s 1440p. The 5080 jumps to 205 FPS AVG, the 5090 to 290 FPS AVG, and the 7900 XTX to 195. The XTX is still competitive here, especially given the price and generational differences; likewise, the 4080 still makes the 5080 relatively uninteresting. This feels like a sidegrade.

RTX 5080 Efficiency

Power efficiency testing is next, measured using power interposers and capturing only GPU power. We are not measuring total system power for this and instead isolate for the GPU. The PCIe slot is intercepted and measured as well.

Power Consumption: Idle

Idle power consumption is far better on the RTX 5080 than the RTX 5090. Keep in mind that idle power testing is very situational to the monitor, refresh rate, and power plans -- but our test setup is identical unit-to-unit, so that’s all that matters here. They are all under the same conditions.

Under these conditions, the RTX 5080 was at 12.75W when idle on the desktop. This is close (but improved upon) the RTX 4080’s 15-16W idle power draw, both of which are far below the 4090’s 29W and 5090’s 46W power consumption. 

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 14 at 4K had the RTX 5080 at the top of the chart for efficiency. Comparatively, this is a great result. Its 298W draw here leaves headroom in the TDP budget, with the relatively high framerate enabling it to outperform the 269W 4080 Super for efficiency and performance alike. It also outdoes the 5090, which scored 0.34 FPS/W. The 5080 significantly outdoes the RX 7900 XTX, which ran at 0.24 FPS/W and 430W.

This appears to be a possible strong point for the RTX 5080.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

1440p gives us a lot more cards on the chart since we’ve tested more mid-range devices, but with the downside that the high-end devices scale their best at 4K. That means we lose some of the framerate scaling advantage.

The 5080 is still tied for the most efficient on this chart after rounding, aligning with the 4080 Super as the most efficient GPU we’ve tested yet. It’s at 0.75 FPS/W while pulling 290W, up from the 268W of the 4080 Super but also up in framerate. The 4090 pulled 386W here, with the 5090 at 520W.

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

For efficiency in F1 24 at 4K and with RT, the RTX 5080 ties the 4090 and is within reasonable variance of the 4090 and 4080 Super results. The 5080 pulled 330W in this test, putting it notably lower in power consumption than the RTX 5090’s 569W draw here, but still more than the 4080 Super’s 291W. The 7900 XTX is significantly less efficient in this particular workload, hampered in part by RT but also just by its 422W draw.

RTX 5080 Conclusion 

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Check back soon for our ITX testing with the FE cards and for transient power testing coming up. We’ll look at power excursions in that. We also have a story about MFG, or multi-frame generation, almost entirely complete and coming up. That’ll delve into NVIDIA’s new DLSS and frame generation tech in detail.

Otherwise, that’s all the numbers for now. The quick recap is:

• Thermals on the 5080 FE cooler are good overall and the acoustic profile is similar to the 5090 FE cooler. Check our 5090 FE review for that
• The efficiency is toward the top of the charts and the card seems to be more within the optimal power range than the 5090 (Be mindful of scalped prices)
• For gaming performance, this is one of the largest gaps we’ve ever seen between the top 2 cards
• The 5090 leads the 5080 (Be mindful of scalped prices) anywhere from 30% to nearly 70% in 4K benchmark results
• The 5080 is a relatively boring uplift over the 4080, unfortunately. This must be why NVIDIA has pushed MFG so hard
• The 7900 XTX is a strong competitor in rasterization, but is assailable in ray tracing
• Finally, the low VRAM capacity continues to be an unfortunate way to segment the 90-class cards into the professional user camp. The 5080 being a 16GB device destroys its usefulness to people who do work like our Premiere and Blender rendering -- but that’s probably the plan to drive 5090 sales
• Unfortunately, the 4090 cards have largely evaporated or there might be a strong argument for them still with the VRAM boost

With several partner models listed at $1,200 to $1,400 in pre-launch listings, the value isn’t compelling. We also continue to take issue with NVIDIA’s hugely misleading “benchmarks” on its website:

The 5080 is shown as being 2x the speed of the 4080 in several tests, but again, this has to do with its MFG 4X Mode that’s only available on the 50-series. We’re testing that. The boring range of 10% to maybe 20% in some situations is more common. We ranted about this in the 5090 review if you want more.

This is why NVIDIA is pushing MFG so hard: The 5080 otherwise is a boring product generationally. When the gap is sometimes 10 FPS over the 4080 Super at the same price, it’s just hard to get excited about. It seems like a tool to create 5090 sales.

As for the bets of tater tots within the office, it looks like Jimmy wins this one. They’ll have a rematch for the 5070 and 4090.

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Intel Arc B570 'Battlemage' GPU Review & Benchmarks, Low-End CPU Tests, & Efficiencyjimmy_thang January 27, 2025

We put Intel’s latest Battlemage GPU through a series of benchmarks and look at it coupled with older/lower-end CPUs

The Highlights

• The B570 is the second Battlemage GPU from Intel
• The B570 loses some steam at lower resolutions like 1080p
• The B570 is another example of how Intel has definitely improved over its first generation GPUs
• Original MSRP: $220
• Release Date: January 16, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today, we’re reviewing the Intel Arc B570 Battlemage GPU. The B570 has an MSRP of $220 and follows-up the $250 B580 that we reviewed previously. Intel’s B570 price point lands it in territory where AMD’s RX 6600 (watch our review) and 6600 XT used to fight. Today, that price class is mostly vacant of modern architecture solutions. The RX 7600 (watch our review) is the closest, typically around $250, and sometimes on sale. NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 (watch our review) remains around $300 typically.
Battlemage had an overall good launch. Lately, it’s been getting coverage for a potential for driver overhead in some test configurations that cause disproportionately bad performance on older CPUs. In addition to our 9800X3D test platform, we also ran several cards back through on a 5600X (watch our review) with locked clocks and an i5-12400 (watch our review). The short answer to the question of whether it changes performance is “no.” The long answer is that we have extra charts to show why not. There are scenarios where it can matter, but other than a couple instances, they do not really emerge in our test suite.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 16, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan
Mike Gaglione

Power Data Aggregation

Jeremy Clayton

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Anyway, let’s get into the B570 review.

Intel Arc B570 Overview

Check out our B580 review if you want more detail on frametime pacing and on the basics of the architecture. For a quick recap of the specs:

The B580 GPU is a 20 Xe-core configuration on 5 render slices, a 190W TBP, and 12GB of GDDR6. Memory bandwidth is relatively high for a card of this class, at 456 GB/s. The B570 card drops 2 of the Xe cores to land at 18 and is still set up on 5 render slices. RT units get cut down as well, TBP is at 150W, and memory is set up at 10GB of GDDR6 with a 380GB/s bandwidth. The memory interface is a smaller 160 bits.

Here’s a quick pricing recap:

At the time of writing this ahead of launch, we checked Newegg and Amazon for several GPUs.

The Intel B580 GPU is mostly out of stock at the actual MSRP and being scalped at the time we’re writing this. On Newegg, it’s $340 and up right now, which is far too much to pay. It’s likely that when this story is published, the retailers will restock with B580s that are closer to normal, but we can’t review the future.

The RTX 4060 is currently around $295 to $320, with units regularly available at $300.

The AMD RX 7600 is $250 as of writing this, making it the closest price competition on a relatively modern architecture.

Enough of that. We have a lot of charts to get through today, so let’s start with the alternative CPU testing.

We are going to present charts that have 3 CPUs per card on them. The way to use these is not to compare the GPUs to each other, but rather to compare the same GPU against itself across 3 CPUs. This is to test whether Arc is disproportionately impacted by lower-end CPUs, meaning to test whether relative percent scaling against its competition worsens on a more likely pairing of a lower-end CPU.

We locked the 5600X to its single-core frequency except across all cores for one set of tests, then we used a 12400 for the other set. 

The current topic, at least as we’ve seen it mostly discussed in comments, is that Intel may be disproportionately hurt by driver overhead. Our testing is done with the intent to create a GPU bottleneck, as this isn’t a CPU review, and our content is done with maximum controls with the intent that you’d check both the CPU and GPU review. In this instance, we are still enacting controls, but potentially using a lower-end CPU. We kept our game settings the same, though, which means that even 1080p will often be GPU bottlenecked.

Intel Arc B570 Bounded Benchmarks

FFXIV - 1080p

This chart is for Final Fantasy 14 at 1080p.

We’ll look at all of the B580 rows first:

• With a 9800X3D, the B580 ran at 124 FPS AVG
• With a 5600X and a fixed all-core frequency, it was at 122 FPS AVG
• With the 12400, it was at 120 FPS AVG

There is no substantial change to the B580’s performance across these three CPUs with this test configuration.

Moving to the RTX 4060: The 4060 on the 9800X3D bench, 5600X bench, and 12400 bench performed identically. It was about 112-114 FPS AVG on all of them. There is no substantial change to performance.

The RX 7600 saw a performance drop on the i5-12400, but on the other two systems, was about the same.

With the B570, we observed approximately equivalent performance from the 12400, 5600X, and the 9800X3D (read our review). As such, the percent difference between all of these devices is overall comparable in this test, despite which CPU is used.

Across all tested devices, we did observe a reduction in 0.1% low performance as the CPU was reduced to lower performance levels. As an example, the RX 7600 with the 9800X3D, at 84 FPS 0.1%, versus with the 5600X at 62.1. This is expected.

FFXIV - 1440p

Here’s the test at 1440p. In this benchmark, we did not observe a meaningful difference in B580 performance across the 3 CPUs. The same is true for the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600. We are not able to detect any differences beyond slight variance across platforms. The B570 also does not scale differently and scores almost identically across the three platforms. The data consistency for average FPS is actually remarkable. This means that the unbound data later will be sufficient for establishing differences between averages.

As for lows, we are seeing consistently reduced lows on the lower-end CPUs in this game. The 5600X and 12400 both had worse 0.1% lows than the 9800X3D with the B570. With the RTX 4060, we’re seeing stable 0.1% lows across all 3 devices. With the RX 7700 XT (watch our review), we saw differing lows between the 9800X3D and 12400. With the RX 7600, we saw stable lows across all 3.

It would appear that, based on the B580, B570, and A770 (read our revisit) data, there may be an argument to worse lows on lower-end CPUs for Arc. We’ll need more games.

FFXIV - 4K

At 4K, everything is remarkably consistent. This mostly includes lows as well, although exceptions like the 9800X3D and 5600X for the A770 apply.

Broadly speaking, the GPUs are about the same here across all configurations here.

Cyberpunk - 1080p

This is Cyberpunk at 1080p/Ultra. We’ll go through it fast: The results do not change CPU-to-CPU. The only differences are on the RTX 4060, where we see worse lows on the lower-end CPUs, the A770, where we see a very slightly lower average, and the 7700 XT, where we see a change in 0.1% lows. The B580 and B570 do not exhibit a change. In fact, realistically, the CPU change does not affect any of these results with regard to how we do a standard review. They are the same. This is GPU-bound, so that’s what you’d expect. Some of the internet has lost the plot and think “Arc bad at 1080p,” but it’s not that simple. It depends on the GPU load and the game.

Starfield - 1080p

Starfield is known to be problematic for Arc. We have that discussion in the standalone chart, but we’ll focus only on scaling within a given card here. We did not observe a difference in the relative ranking of the B580 or B570 versus their competition in this test. Relative percent scaling did not get worse with lower-end CPUs.

At 1080p, there is a slight difference at the top-end with the 7700 XT and the 12400 as a potential CPU bind comes into play.

The RTX 4060 is identical in AVG FPS performance across all 3 CPUs; however, we observed worse frametime pacing on the 5600X and 12400 for the RTX 4060. Ultimately, they are the same level of reduction from the 9800X3D, so the two lower-end CPUs are comparable to each other.

The RX 7600 is identical in AVG FPS performance and within variance on all 3. Again, the 9800X3D has a slight advantage in frametime pacing.

The B580 is identical on all 3 for AVG FPS. There is also no meaningful difference in frametime pacing or 0.1% low performance. Note though that the B580 has some troublesome lows in this title already, but they don’t get worse on lower-end CPUs.

The B570 is the same and the results are within variance for all 3 metrics.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

This is Resident Evil 4 at 1080p.

The 7700 XT exhibits a slight ceiling with the 12400, but is mostly comparable. The B580 ran at 128 FPS AVG with the 9800X3D and 122 with the 5600X. We didn’t run this test on the 12400 configuration. The B570 had all 3, though: The 9800X3D has it at 110 FPS AVG, or 5% ahead of the 5600X configuration and 5.7% ahead of the 12400 configuration.

The RTX 4060 ran at 107.9 FPS AVG on the 9800X3D and 106.5 FPS AVG on the 12400. The RTX 4060 shows a top-to-bottom range of 1.3%, smaller than the observed difference on the B570. This slightly reconstructs the stack such that the B570 ends up tied or slightly under the RTX 4060 rather than ahead of it by 2.1%; however, the reduction puts the RTX 4060 on like-for-like hardware maximally 2% ahead. Between the two, they’re realistically about the same.

As for 0.1% low performance, the Arc cards underperform compared to the RTX 4060 on all CPUs. This does not get disproportionately worse on the 5600X or 12400 and instead scales with the average. The disadvantage in lows exists on the 9800X3D standard CPU and on the lower-end ones.

Baldur’s Gate - 1440p

Next up is Baldur’s Gate 3. We only run this test at 1440p and 4K due to the low load. 

In this test, the RX 7700 XT found a hard bottleneck with the i5-12400. This capped out at 79 FPS AVG, as opposed to the unbound test at 133 FPS AVG. This would be appropriate for a CPU review, but does not show GPU performance. The RTX 4060 on the 12400 further reinforces these limits (although bounces off of them way harder, with much worse 0.1% lows as a result of the CPU, not the GPU). The RTX 4060 exhibits identical AVG FPS with all 3 configurations. The lows are better on the 9800X3D as it allows the GPU to hit frame pacing without external binds, which is expected behavior.

The RX 7600 is restricted by the CPUs with the 5600X and i5-12400, with both lower than the 9800X3D’s result. Again, this is normal and is the expected result from a CPU bind. Lows are hurt as a result of limiting the ceiling.

The B580 also experienced a performance reduction with the 12400, but a much larger one with the R5 5600X. To do some quick math:

The RX 7600 at 77.1 FPS AVG with the 12400 gains 11.1% by moving to the 9800X3D.

The B580 with the 12400 at 63.7 FPS AVG gains 16.2% by moving to the 9800X3D. That’s not as a big of a difference as we might expect, but it is larger than we saw on the 7600.

The 5600X is a far different story, with a maximum uplift of 32% from the 5600X unit to the 9800X3D at 74 FPS AVG. This may be the driver overhead.

The B570 shows similar behavior, with scaling worse on the 5600X than on the 12400. Lows are not disproportionately worse on any of them; in other words, the lows follow the behavior relative to other devices also scaling with the CPU.

This would possibly change our recommendation for a 5600X user, but not a 12400 user where there is only a 3 FPS difference.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 4K

At 4K, the 7700 XT is the same on both CPUs for AVG FPS, but worse in frametime pacing on the 12400. This is expected behavior when using a worse CPU.

The A770 has identical performance between the 9800X3D and 5600X.

The RTX 4060 has identical performance between all 3. There is a 1.3 FPS AVG difference as a result of not only run-to-run variance between the 3, but also the frametime pacing is also much better on the 9800X3D for the RTX 4060, which will influence the AVG FPS results.

The RX 7600 has the same AVG FPS on all 3 CPUs, with better frametime pacing on the 9800X3D.

The B580 has identical performance on all 3 CPUs for AVG FPS, with a slight 1% low advantage on the 9800X3D. 

The B570 is identical on all 3 CPUs, with better lows on the 9800X3D.

All of this behavior is expected for a GPU bind. 

Black Myth - 1080p

Black Myth will be brief as well: At 1080p/High, which is our standardized test platform, there is no meaningful, broad difference in scaling.

The numbers do not change in any meaningful way. The 7700 XT is the same on both, the 4060 is the same on all 3, the 7600 is the same on all 3 (with the exception of reduced lows on the 12400), the B580 is the same on all 3 and lows are within variance run-to-run. The B570 is the same on all 3, with lows within the wider variance at the low-end. The A770 is the same on both.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

We’ll look at one more. 

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, they are all the same from CPU-to-CPU, with a few notes.

The 7700 XT is roughly identical. The RTX 4060 is mostly identical, with the 12400 potentially showing marginally worse performance. The RX 7600 is the same across all 3, with slightly worse 0.1% lows. 

The B580 is the same across all 3, with worse 0.1% lows on the 5600X specifically. The B570 is the same across all 3 in all 3 metrics.

The A770 is the same in all 3 metrics.

Discussion

Let’s quickly talk results: First, in most scenarios, there is no meaningful impact. The biggest situation was with the 5600X in Baldur’s Gate 3. The 12400 did not react as violently. The secondary impact is in some 0.1% low differences, but these often also manifested on other devices.

This does not affect how we review GPUs. We have to make that clear here. There is no data to support that our conclusions would be different if we ran lower-end CPUs with these cards. It would just cap the ceiling of how much change you can see. 

That’s not to say there isn’t driver overhead or that there can’t be. We are aware that multiple outlets have now shown this. However, we tested with High and Ultra settings and simply were not able to replicate the impact. Our belief is that in scenarios of extremely high framerate, such as 200+, or in situations where the CPU is heavily bound from low settings and lower resolutions, that’d be where you’d see the difference. But we don’t test GPUs for review with low settings and we currently don’t test esports titles, so these would not show up in our data.

Others do. We’d encourage you to check them, as everyone in this space provides a different set of tests for unique value. This story is long enough as is, but what we can say is that our entire usual suite has now been validated on two low-end CPUs and we have found the performance does not meaningfully change the conclusions except perhaps in one main scenario tested.

Intel Arc B570 Unbound Testing

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FFXIV - 4K

Final Fantasy 14 at 4K is up first for the unbound benchmarks on the 9800X3D.

In this one, the B570 ran at about 41 FPS AVG, establishing a 16% advantage for the B580 at 47 FPS AVG against a 14% price bump by MSRP. This is pretty close to linear. The B570 roughly ties the A770 in AVG FPS and 1% low, with 0.1% lows close enough. It also outperforms the RTX 4060 by 11%, the 3060 by 23%, and the A580 (read our review) by the same. The RX 7600 card landed at around 32 FPS AVG, giving the B570 a notable lead, especially at the price. There are also substantial improvements on the RX 6600, which was the previous leader in this price class (though it eventually sold for cheaper).

For some references to older cards, we also have the GTX 1070 (watch our review), GTX 1060 watch our review), and GTX 1650 (watch our review) present. 

FFXIV - 1440p

At 1440p, the B570 ran at 75 FPS AVG against the B580’s 86 FPS AVG, which puts the B580 about 15% ahead of the B570. It had a marginally higher lead at 4K. The B570 now sits between the A770 and A750 (watch our review), so the A770 has slightly re-positioned itself as resolution came down. The RTX 4060 also gets closer to the B570, now at 72 FPS AVG, nearing equivalence despite a larger gap previously.

This is the same behavior we saw in the B580 review: The higher the resolution goes, generally speaking, the more of an advantage Battlemage has over its peers in the class. The lead over the RX 7600 is 14% here, with the RX 6600 XT and 3060 (watch our review) below it. Some older reference anchors include the RTX 2060 (watch our review), GTX 1070, 1060, and 1650.

Frametime pacing on the B570 is good overall, performing similarly to the RTX 4060 for frame-to-frame interval. 

FFXIV - 1080p

At 1080p, the B570 loses its advantage against the RX 7600 and RTX 4060. The B580 maintains a lead over these two cards with its 124 FPS AVG, although its frametime pacing, indicated by the 0.1% lows, is worse than what we’re seeing on the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. We dove into this in the B580 review.

Overall, Battlemage and the B570 remain a large improvement over Alchemist, especially at the price; however, we still see that reduction in relative performance as resolution decreases, even with an unbound configuration. At 1440p and higher, Battlemage when unbound seems to be more competitive than it is at 1080p.

Starfield - 1440p

Starfield is next. Intel had a lot of problems with Starfield when the game launched -- namely, the problem was that it didn’t work.

But it does now. Despite working, NVIDIA and AMD retain an advantage with the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 cards. The B580’s 41 FPS AVG leads the B570’s 36 FPS by 12%. The RX 7600 leads by 17%, with the 4060 leading by a staggering 31%. This is an example of one of the games where Battlemage is disadvantaged even when unbound, even at 1440p.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the B570 GPU ran at 47 FPS AVG, planting it between the A770 of last-gen and the RX 6600 XT. Against Alchemist, it’s clear that Battlemage is a huge improvement when considering the configuration size of the A770 GPU against the B570 GPU. Against itself, Intel has definitely improved in huge ways. Against competition, the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 both hold advantages at both the resolution and with the game.

The B580 ends up 10% ahead of the B570 in this test, so its value isn’t always linear.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 at 4K was one of the B580’s strongest titles. In this test, the B580 marginally outperformed the RTX 4060 Ti (watch our review) in averages, with the 0.1% lows close enough to be comparable given wider margins. The B580 at 46 FPS AVG leads the B570’s 40 FPS AVG by about 16%, aligning with some of the other 4K results. The B570 ends up outperforming the RX 7600 by 7% and the RTX 4060 by 14%, which is an incredible lead for the B570 when fully GPU-bound. Considering the RTX 4060’s price, this is a big lead for Intel.

The improvement on the A580 is also noteworthy, with similar gains.

Lows on the B570 are not meaningfully different from those on the RX 7600, 6600 XT, or RTX 4060. The frame pacing is comparable.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the B580 is still spaced about 16% over the B570. The B570’s lead over the RX 7600 has reduced and they are now mostly equivalent, with the B570 experiencing less consistent lows. This is something we showed in our B580 review, if you’d like to learn more about why it hits this ceiling.

The RTX 4060 also climbs relative to the B570, with its 70 FPS AVG result reducing the B570’s advantage to just 6%. This is while the RTX 4060 maintains slightly better 0.1% low results for a better average frame-to-frame interval. The B570 is still overall better here, but as we continue to reduce resolution, that’ll change.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

This is 1080p. With these settings, the B570 is now roughly tied with the RX 7600. The RTX 4060 is encroaching on the B570, which has had its lead when GPU-bound cut to 2%. That’s still impressive for the price and for the age of Intel’s new architecture. If we imagine the B570 line item were some hypothetical new NVIDIA card at $220, this would be an amazing move in the right direction for NVIDIA. The fact that Intel is still proving itself and working through some teething pains is the only hesitation that remains, though they have reduced that generationally so far.

Even still, the B570’s frametime pacing is inconsistent. It bounces around in this title, with run-to-run variance higher than we see on any AMD or NVIDIA device. This remains a challenge in some specific games. It’s overall acceptable, but not as consistent as its peers.

As for the B580, its lead over the B570 is about 18 FPS, or 16.4%.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 4K

Next is Baldur’s Gate 3, which remains one of the best titles launched in the last couple years.

At 4K, the B570 ran at 40 FPS AVG with our Ultra settings. This has it just below the RTX 3060 and above the A580, RX 6600 (watch our review), and RTX 2060. The B580’s 44.8 FPS AVG result leads the B570 by 13%, with both exhibiting limited scaling in the 0.1% lows, indicating frame-to-frame consistency issues as compared to NVIDIA neighbors.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 1440p

1440p has the B570 at 67 FPS AVG, between the A750 and A580. The generational uplift isn’t nearly as impressive here as in some of the other games. The B580 is about 11% better than the B570 here, with the RTX 4060’s 80 FPS AVG putting it 20% improved in average FPS, plus a significant uplift in 0.1% lows to represent smoother frametime pacing. The RX 7600 outperforms both the RTX 4060 and B570, including in lows.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

Let’s move on to Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty at 1440p.

In this test, the B570 ran at 46 FPS AVG, with the B580 at 54 FPS AVG. The B580’s lead is about 16%, which is consistent with other high load scenarios; in fact, the B580 bordered on the RTX 4070 in this test, which we didn’t see happen elsewhere but which has consistently happened in this game. Its lows aren’t nearly as good as what the RTX 4070 offers (at 50 FPS 0.1% to 31 FPS), but this was still a good showing for Battlemage.

The B570 reinforces that, functionally tying in average with the RX 6700 XT (watch our review). This is an impressive feat. For both, it’s the memory bandwidth benefitting the cards here. Unfortunately, the low pacing just isn’t as good on the B570 as its neighboring devices, including the larger config A750. The B570 leads the 4060 by 18% here in a staggering flip favoring Battlemage for averages, again with the caveat of the lows being better on NVIDIA.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty - 1080p

At 1080p, the B570 ran at 71 FPS AVG, with the B580 sustaining a 13% uplift in average framerate. Battlemage still has worse lows than neighbors. At this resolution, the RTX 4060 begins to encroach on B570 and functionally ties it in average framerate while offering substantially improved frame pacing behavior. The RX 7600 is the same, roughly tied with the RTX 4060 and overall a better experience than the B570.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

Black Myth: Wukong is up next, tested at 1080p/high first. With these settings, the B570 maintains about 40 FPS AVG with lows around or below 30 FPS averaged. This has the RX 6600 XT (watch our review) and RTX 3060 both above the B570, with the B570 above the RX 6600 non-XT (watch our review) and RTX 2060. The B580’s 46 FPS AVG gives it a lead of 15%, with the RX 7600 16% ahead and RTX 4060 (at 54 FPS AVG) ahead of the B570 by 36%. That’s a huge lead for the 4060.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, the B570 is reduced to 30 FPS AVG. This gives the RTX 4060 a 22% lead, with the B580’s 35 FPS about 15% ahead.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up next, first at 1440p/Max without RT. In this test, the B580 sticks to a 15% lead over the B570, so that’s consistent. The RTX 4060 leads the B580 and the B570 alike, with the RX 7600 about tied with the RTX 4060 and within run-to-run variance. The B570 is not particularly strong here. It’s about the same as the 3060 and outperforms the RX 6600. The price is noteworthy, although the B580 is overall more competitive in raw performance. In the least, lows are comparable in this test to non-Intel parts.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, performance falls overall as compared to competition. This is consistent with other tests. The gap from the B570 to the B580 remains 15%, with the 4060 now leading the B570 by 30% and the B580 by 7%. AMD’s RX 7600 also holds a similar lead.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

Dying Light 2 is up now. At 1440p, the B570 ran at 53 FPS AVG in what’s one of the strongest relative showings unbound for the card. This has it ahead of the RTX 4060 by 8%. Lows are also better, which is important for Arc. The lead over the RX 7600 is 13%. As for the B580, Intel’s $250 baseline model is about 18.6% ahead of the B570 here.

Dying Light 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the B580 maintained an 18.7% advantage at 87 FPS to 73 FPS AVG over the B570. The RTX 4060 lands between the two and is closer to the B570. Intel has marginally better 0.1% low averages here. The RX 7600 is roughly tied with the B570 in this test.

Intel Arc B570 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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We’re moving on to ray tracing now, tested with the unbound configuration. We’ll keep this as focused as possible. These tests are not comparable to the rasterization performance, especially as some settings (such as upscaling) may change.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 4K

In Resident Evil 4 at 4K with RT and FSR, the B570 ran at 43 FPS AVG and with lows overall acceptable for its average. That has it ahead of the RTX 4060 in a strong showing for Intel. The B580 leads the B570 by 16%, which puts it functionally identical in performance to the RTX 4060 Ti.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the B570 ran at 66 FPS AVG and tied with the RX 7600 in every metric. Considering the B570’s price advantage at time of writing, that’s a competitive spot to be. The RTX 4060 leads the B570 by 8%, flipping from what we saw at the higher resolution and consistent with knowledge that Arc disproportionately scales better at higher resolution. The B580 is 15% ahead of the B570 here.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

At 1080p, the B570 ran at 81 FPS AVG. The RX 7600 now slightly outperforms it. Realistically, these are the same perceived performance, but lower resolution performance scaling remains stronger on NVIDIA and AMD. The RTX 4060 is now up at 95 FPS AVG, a lead over the B570 of 17%. The B580 is about tied with the 4060.

Ray Tracing: Dying Light 2 - 1080p

Dying Light 2 with RT is up now. At 1080p, the B570 ran at 55 FPS AVG and held proportional lows, which is what we want. These results have it close enough to the RTX 4060 that they’re experientially the same. The RTX 4060 has a lead of 5% over the B570, with the B580 leading both at 65 FPS AVG. The B580’s average framerate is 18% higher than the B570 in a notable distinction. The RX 7600 lands below all of these, closer to the RTX 3060 and below the A580. Intel’s Arc has overall strong RT performance in this title.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

In Dragon’s Dogma 2 with RT and at 1080p, the B570 ran at 39 FPS AVG. Unfortunately for Intel, this is one of its worst relative results. Ray tracing in this game is hard for the Intel cards. They don’t maintain the scaling from elsewhere when tested against the 7600 or RTX 4060 here.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the B570 holds a 31 FPS AVG, the B580 a 36 FPS AVG, and the 7600 and 4060 are both just under 40 FPS AVG. Again, Intel is disproportionately disfavored in this test set.

Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk - 1080p Medium

Cyberpunk with RT Medium is next. Battlemage remains super competitive here, with the B570 performing better than the RTX 4060. The average framerate is about the same, but the RTX 4060 suffers from wildly inconsistent frametimes in this test. We showed that in the B580 review with a frametime plot, where the 4060 was spiky as a result of its VRAM limitations.

The B580 keeps its 16% lead over the B570 in this test, with both outdoing the RTX 4060. The RTX 4060 Ti even struggles in this, also suffering from inconsistent run-to-run variance and low performance for 0.1%. AMD has problems of its own, mostly just that it’s unable to compete in this test. The RX 7600 is down under 30 FPS AVG. At this price point, Battlemage is actually the best in this specific test and setup.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong - 1080p (Experimental)

Black Myth: Wukong is up now. This is one of our experimental charts. This designation is reserved for charts where we’re still evaluating the methodology and the accuracy, and so you shouldn’t assign as much weight to these since we are still leaving open the possibility of some sort of test limitation or issue.

As it stands now, the B570 lands between the A750 and A580 with RT. The B580 is about the same as the RX 7800 XT (watch our review), with the B570 outperforming the RX 7600, so both are competitive with AMD. NVIDIA is up in orbit though with this game, with the RTX 4060 up at 52 FPS AVG in this test with these settings.

Power Consumption & Efficiency (Experimental)

Efficiency testing is up next. This is also a part of our suite of experimental tests, meaning we are still developing methods and that there is more room than typical for possible error or future revisions. This testing is done with an Elmor Labs PMD2 that has been calibrated personally by Elmor on our request. Testing includes both PCIe slot and PCIe cable power consumption, but excludes all other power, including the CPU.

Power Consumption: Idle

In idle testing, Intel Arc remains power hungry as compared to its competition. Using our test platform as configured for benchmarking, the B570 pulled about 30W idle. The B580 was around 35W. This is overall high.

Efficiency: Baldur’s Gate 3 (1440p)

Baldur’s Gate 3 at 1440p shows FPS/W, meaning that higher framerate and lower power will create the most efficient result. Higher is better.

The most efficient device here so far is the 4060 Ti of those tested. The B580 was in the middle of the pack, at 0.52 FPS/W. That had it between the 6600 series. The B570 is more efficient than the B580, at 0.55 FPS/W and below the RX 7800 XT.

Efficiency: FFXIV (1440p)

Final Fantasy 14 at 1440p is an OK showing for the B570. At 0.54 FPS/W, it’s near the RTX 4060 and better than the B580. This is an OK spot to be in for Intel.

Efficiency: FFXIV (1080p)

At 1080p, the B570 produces 0.81 FPS/W and sits again below the RTX 4060 and above the B580 and 7800 XT. Against AMD, Intel is looking good, but NVIDIA maintains its advantage here.

Efficiency: Black Myth Wukong (1080p)

In Black Myth at 1080p, the B570 sits between the RTX 4060 and B580 again. Performance is acceptable overall and far improved from the A-series, like the A580 or A770.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty (RT, 1080p)

Cyberpunk is the last one. This is a pretty good showing for Intel: The B570 isn’t tied with the RTX 4060, but it’s getting a lot closer. The 0.28 FPS/W result is far improved over the 7800 XT and puts it in 4th of the devices tested so far. Note that the 4090 (watch our review) looks inefficient here as it is becoming bound by other components at this resolution.

Intel Arc B570 Conclusion

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Providing some highlights, our B570 conclusion generally feels very similar to our conclusion with the B580 in that Intel has definitely improved over Alchemist. The B570 and B580 are often outperforming the A750 and A770, which are larger configs, especially the A770. That’s a good place for Intel to be against itself. Against the competition, there’s a lot of trading back and forth. There are some games where the B570 is similar to or slightly exceeds the RTX 4060, but there are situations where the opposite is true. The trend that persists is that the higher the resolution is, regardless of the discussion around driver overhead, the Battlemage series cards will typically either gain on the competition or pull away from them, depending on where they started. You could also look at it the other way and say that as you approach lower resolutions like 1080p, results get closer together, and many times they’ll trade blows. 

Like with our B580 review, we didn’t experience any spectacular failures and crashes this time. Compared to Alchemist, the card is far improved. While NVIDIA’s drivers are known to be the most stable, Intel is certainly improving here.

In terms of value, the B580 remains a very competitive price, and the B570 is similar.  On average in our results, the B580 tends to be about 15-16% better than the B570. At the upper end of that, we’ll see about a 18.7-19% advantage for the B580 over the B570. At the lower-end, we’ll see about a 10% gain or so. That performance difference largely aligns with the price difference between the 2 cards with the B580 going for roughly $250 vs the B570’s roughly $220 price.

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition Review & Benchmarks: Gaming, Thermals, & Powerjimmy_thang January 24, 2025

We take a deep dive and look at the 5090’s value, thermals, acoustics, airflow, frequency, and numerous game benchmarks that includes ray-tracing tests

The Highlights

• The RTX 5090 is NVIDIA’s new flagship video card that uses the company’s new Blackwell architecture
• The GPU does not live up to NVIDIA’s hyperbolic performance claims
• The 5090 outperforms the 4090 by 20-50% in our 4K rasterization tests and about 27-35% in our 4K ray tracing benchmarks
• Original MSRP: $2,000
• Release Date: January 30, 2025

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

This is a big review, we’ll respect your time: The short version of the review of the RTX 5090 Founders Edition is that the thermal solution is surprisingly good for GPU thermals, if a bit warm for memory thermals, the rasterization gaming uplift at 4K over the RTX 4090 (watch our review) is anywhere from 20% to 50% (depending on the game), ray tracing at 4K is commonly around 27% to 35% uplift over the 4090, and performance improvement at resolutions like 1440p and 1080p see lower improvements. An additional storyline to this review is that the 9800X3D (read our review) remains completely insane in the best ways, because it was able to keep up even at 1080p without major bottlenecking in some benchmarks.

Today, we’re looking at gaming performance, efficiency, thermals, acoustics, ray tracing, and power consumption.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 23, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Testing, Video Editing

Mike Gaglione

Testing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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First off, we have a huge amount of content related to this card coming up since the Founders Edition model is so unique. Make sure you check back regularly over the next few days to catch our benchmarks in common mini-ITX cases, the impact of the GPU on CPU and CPU cooler thermals, and some other tests. We also have a tear-down coming up.

Normally, these Founders Edition models don’t warrant a ton of discussion. This one does, but we’ll keep it short.

The RTX 5090 Founders Edition moves to a 2-slot design and uses a dual flow-through configuration, so they’ve sandwiched the PCB centrally and offset the PCIe slot to the side and down as a result. That also means that NVIDIA needs a separate PCB for the I/O that feeds monitors, connected via a flex cable to the main PCB. To get a 2-slot cooler capable of handling 575W or more, NVIDIA is using liquid metal with a triple-walled gasket to both contain the liquid metal and prevent exposure that could change its consistency and efficacy. 

The FE model does a lot of small things to improve performance, like exhausting the air out the top of the card and away from the GPU inlet. You’ll see that in our Schlieren imaging below.

We have a full video with Malcolm Gutenberg, Lead Thermal Engineer on the FE card, breaking down the changes.

RTX 5090 Pricing

The NVIDIA RTX 5090 is supposed to be $2,000 and will have official availability on January 30th, joined by the $1,000 MSRP RTX 5080 on the same date. NVIDIA also has the 5070 Ti and 5070 launching in presumably February for $750 and $550.

The NVIDIA RTX 4090 had an MSRP of $1,600, then was regularly priced around $2,000-$2,500 due to shortages and demand, and is basically out of stock except at terrible third-party seller prices now. The RX 7900 XTX (watch our review) is AMD’s closest competitor. Pricing is around $870 to $900. The company has also bowed out of the high-end race. The 9070 and 9070 XT, AMD’s next cards, should be coming around March or so.

Intel is currently only fighting at the low-end and mid-range.

Which makes all of this somewhat weird, because there are no head-to-head competitors right now. The closest comparison is the RTX 4090, then maybe the RX 7900 XTX from AMD’s side. 

RTX 5090 Overview

The RTX 5090 has 32GB of GDDR7 memory, which is a big change, and runs on the Blackwell architecture, which follows Ada Lovelace. It’s introduced alongside multi-frame generation (MFG) and DLSS4, which we’ll talk about later. 

The 5090 is also a true PCIe Gen5 device, but that’ll be another separate piece soon to check back for the differences.

If you want to see our testing methodology, we’ve published the test bench and the list of games and their settings here, which will let you get quick answers to what we’re doing. It doesn’t have every answer, but we’re slowly adding to it with each review cycle. 

RTX 5090 Thermals

Here’s a thermal chart running the RTX 5090 under its auto VBIOS fan curve with a Port Royal RT stress test at 4K.

GPU temperature plots at about 72 degrees Celsius once it hits steady state for overall temperature when tested in a controlled room ambient of 21 to 22 degrees Celsius. This GPU temperature is genuinely impressive considering the size of the card, and that’s important to remember. At 2 slots versus that 4-slot monster we’ve seen for the last few years, this is an excellent result given the size. Our prototype testing already told us what NVIDIA can do with a fully committed, fatter design if you’re curious what that’d look like.

Memory temperature ran warm, unfortunately, at 89 to 90 degrees Celsius. This is higher than we’d like to see, especially considering it could be warmer in certain case configurations with a higher internal ambient temperature. This is technically still within the TjMax of these memory modules as far as we could find, so there isn’t an imminent threat to the card, but this would be an area for NVIDIA to improve; our primary concern is in hotbox cases or small form factor solutions, which we’re looking into as a follow up that you should check back regularly for. While these results are higher than what we’d like to see, in most high airflow ATX cases, it is okay.

Adding GPU fan speed to this chart, the fans both hit around 1570 RPM. We should get to acoustic testing for more on this.

RTX 5090 Acoustics

We took the RTX 5090 to our hemi-anechoic sound chamber to evaluate it. A good GPU temperature is an achievement at this size, but that can almost always be done by just blasting the fan speeds and compromising on noise levels.

We ran the card at the default fan RPM that the card set itself to at steady state under our standard thermal workload. 

Here’s the frequency spectrum plot. In our acoustic chamber with a noise floor of about 14-14.5 dBA on the day of testing, the RTX 5090 was measured in our passive test bench at about 32.5 dBA total. That’s at a distance of 1 meter.

The RTX 5090 had some spikes during testing, including above our frequency cutoff, but overall has a very gradual curve for the plot. The limited presence of peaks and spikes in this plot help illustrate the relative uniformity of the whirring noise, which we subjectively think helps it blend into the background more. Noise is subjective, so although this plot objectively tells us that there’s a ping at 350 Hz and a bump in the plot around 515 Hz and again around 2,000 Hz, what matters is how it sounds.

This is a sound sample for you to judge on your own. Note that this is not identical to what we’re presenting as we have boosted it for purposes of being level with our video audio. Listen for the type of noise, not the volume.

Schlieren Imaging of RTX 5090

In our interview with Malcolm Gutenberg, he explained that the 5090’s thermal solution was designed to reduce recirculation using angled covers, which direct airflow. 

In this image, we're looking at the GPU straight-on, with it perpendicular to the camera frustum. This is when the fans are off but the heat load has already started. You can see the density change as the hot air leaves the card passively.

As the fans turn on, we see a sudden flare-up and movement of air to the right through the flow-through area out the back and toward the CPU tower. What's super cool here is that we can see the air kick up and out to the right at a 20-30 degree angle or so. We also see a really high flow area of air exiting from the fins at the outer edges of the heatsink design. This hyper focuses the flow and reduces recirculation around the front area of the card, which just means the whole design is incredibly efficient at getting air away from the board and into case exhaust fans.

Here's the table shifted to see more exhaust. The flow-through area has super high speed exhaust, illustrating why flow-through is so much more effective than shoving air straight into a PCB wall.

Looking at the fans spinning down at the end of a load and returning to passive cooling. Everything drifts up and away.

This next angle shows the card on the left and centered. The most interesting thing we see is this straight line of air shot out from those fins at the outer edges of the fan diameter. This is what Gutenberg was talking about in our interview, where they're capitalizing on the area of most efficacy for the fan blade.

Finally, here's the card straight-on, where we can see the amount of air shot up and out. You'll want to choose cases with some spacing between the glass panel and the card to help get the warmed air away faster.

RTX 5090 Frequency

This next line plot is to ensure the GPU is functioning properly and meets the spec NVIDIA publicly claims. NVIDIA claims the 5090 runs at 2.01 GHz base and 2.41 GHz boost, with room for that to change based on the load. Assuming the software monitoring is correct for this new architecture, we measured about 2600-2700 MHz during the test, commonly 2600-2650 MHz.

The RTX 4090 ran at about 2745 MHz in the same benchmark back when it launched and we tested it. Frequency clearly isn’t everything though, and it’s common that higher end configurations bring frequency down in some capacity. It’s also true that architectural differences also make frequency indirectly comparable.

Ultimately: The card is exceeding the specification advertised by NVIDIA, so it’s running as expected, which is good. 

RTX 5090 Game Benchmarks

Let’s get into gaming benchmarks.

FFXIV 4K

In Final Fantasy 14 at 4K, the RTX 5090 ran at a comically high 182 FPS AVG, with 1% lows that were nearly identical to the average framerate of the RTX 4090. That makes it 31% higher average framerate than the RTX 4090.

For a quick value discussion: The RTX 5090 is supposed to be $2,000, with the RTX 4090’s MSRP previously being $1,600. The 4090 is not commonly available anymore for a reasonable price, though. MSRP-to-MSRP, the 5090 is 25% more expensive and 31% higher framerate in this test. The memory capacity increase benefit isn’t seen in this game either, as that’d be more of an impact in professional applications like Premiere, 3D work, or ML workloads.

The RX 7900 XTX ran at 104 FPS AVG, the same as when we tested it in December (so there’s been no change), which gives the RTX 5090 a lead in this rasterized benchmark of 74%. The 0.1% lows are about the same between all of these devices at the top-end, which mostly comes down to pacing within the game. 

Prior NVIDIA flagships include the RTX 3090 Ti (watch our review) at 88 FPS AVG, meaning that the 5090 has doubled that performance. The frametime pacing was excellent on the 3090 Ti as it closely follows the average. The 3090 (watch our review) was more or less a flagship as well and at 77 FPS AVG. The 6950 XT (watch our review) was also once a flagship, closer to the RTX 3080 (watch our review) for performance.

The RTX 2080 Ti (watch our review) held a 54 FPS AVG, meaning 5090 owners would see an increase of 237% over the 2080 Ti. 

FFXIV 1440p

At 1440p, the 5090 again continues the comically high framerate by running at 317 FPS AVG. This has it about 17% ahead of the RTX 4090’s 272 FPS AVG. The advantage has been trimmed here, which could be because of an encroaching CPU bottleneck and/or because of architectural changes -- 1080p will help answer that below.

For games like this, you’d need a high-end CPU and ideally more intensive resolution to really get full use of the 5090.

Since we’re bottlenecked, we’ll move along but quickly stop to look at 1080p -- just for fun.

FFXIV 1080p

If you thought the previous framerate was funny, cast your sights upon 407 FPS AVG at 1080p. Sorry -- that’s 407.1 FPS AVG. 

Whew. Close one. As we all know, 407 FPS AVG is below the threshold of acceptability for the modern gamer. That 0.1 FPS is critical and is what finally pushes NVIDIA into playable territory for this game.

In serious news: The RTX 4090 at 376 FPS AVG means the 5090 is still about 8% ahead. This test really is just for fun though, but is a good reminder of the limitations of even a 9800X3D to boost the ceiling. 

Black Myth: Wukong - 4K

Black Myth: Wukong is relatively new to our test suite and is tested using the built-in benchmark. We benchmarked it at 4K for this. Currently, we consider this test in our suite to be “experimental,” meaning our confidence in it is present, but lower than other tests as we evaluate its reliability. We have been moving toward removing experimental status from it with each review.

At 4K and where we’ve only tested a handful of cards due to the intensive load, the RTX 5090 ran at 86 FPS AVG with lows at 74 and 70. This has it 28% higher in average framerate than the 67 FPS AVG of the RTX 4090. So far, we’re seeing a few titles around this 30% number at 4K. Comically, the 1% lows, which for us is an average of the slowest 1% of frames, are higher than the average framerate for any other card on this chart; in fact, even the RTX 5090’s slowest 0.1% of frames are faster than the average framerate of the RTX 4090. That’s crazy.

The 7900 XTX’s 49 FPS AVG gives the 5090 a 74% lead, with the 3090 Ti giving it an 89% lead. Improvement over the 2080 Ti is enough to feel irrelevant as a percentage, as it takes it from totally unplayable to relatively fluid.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, Black Myth has the RTX 5090 at 130 FPS AVG, 23% improved over the RTX 4090’s 106 FPS AVG. The lows also improve. The rapid rundown against other flagships is as follows:

The 5090 has a 51% higher average framerate than the 7900 XTX, 75% higher than the 3090 Ti FTW3 (RIP EVGA), 99% higher than the RTX 3090 Master, and 189% higher than the RTX 2080 Ti former flagship.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

Black Myth Wukong is heavy enough that 1080p still has some meaningful spacing, even without ray tracing. The RTX 5090 ran at 160 FPS AVG, with good frametime pacing establishing 127 FPS and 116 FPS lows. The 160 FPS result has it 20% ahead of the RTX 4090, diminishing the earlier lead (which was 28% at 4K, 23% at 1440p, and now 20%). This isn’t just a CPU limit, as we also saw in Final Fantasy, but speaks to other advantages on the 5090 especially at higher resolutions. We think the memory bandwidth is likely a large part of that additional scaling.

The RX 7900 XTX ended up 113 FPS AVG, with the 3090 Ti former flagship at 94 FPS and the 2080 Ti at 62 FPS.

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Starfield - 4K

Starfield is up next. We haven’t run that many cards for this at 4K, but have a lot of 1440p data. We’ll start with the more limited 4K data set.

At 4K, the RTX 5090 held 108 FPS AVG with lows that were within expectations for this game. The RTX 4090 ran 92 FPS AVG, giving the 5090 a lead of just 17%, lower than we’ve seen in some other tests.

The lead over the 7900 XTX’s 77 FPS AVG is 40%, with the lead over the 58.3 result for the 3090 Ti at 85%. The 3080 (watch our review) was down at 48 FPS AVG, with the 2080 Ti at 33 FPS AVG. AMD’s 7900 XTX and 7900 XT (read our revisit) are its highest-end cards available for the company right now, but the 6950 XT was a good deal in the back half of its life.

Starfield - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 ran at 147 FPS AVG against the 132 FPS AVG of the RTX 4090. This is down to a 12% uplift. The 7900 XTX ran at 112 FPS AVG, a big improvement from its 4K result as you would expect, with the 4080 FE (watch our review) at 108 FPS AVG. The 4080 Super (read our review) would be around 1-3% better here if we had retested it.

Starfield - 1080p

There aren’t many reasons you’d play this game at 1080p with an RTX 5090, but just for sake of data: The 5090 ran at 165 FPS AVG here, with the 4090 at 155 FPS AVG. Although technically better for the 5090, we’re effectively at the CPU limit here.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up next. This is another new one that we added in 2024 and has been heavy on GPUs and CPUs alike depending on the test area.

In this limited suite of cards, we have the RTX 5090 at 133 FPS AVG, leading the RTX 4090 by 35%. This is one of the largest gains we saw in our test suite. The lows and 0.1% lows also scaled up, showing that frametime pacing wasn’t at the expense of higher FPS.

The RX 7900 XTX ran at 77 FPS AVG, with the 4080 FE at 72 FPS. Again, the 4080 Super would be about 1-3% above that.

The 2080 Ti from 2018 ran at 36 FPS AVG, and that’s without RT. The improvement to the 5090 is 267%. Climbing the flagships, the 3090 Ti’s 64 FPS AVG ends up giving the 5090 a 108% lead.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 FE climbs in framerate to 189 FPS AVG, with extremely well-paced frametime consistency shown in the high 0.1% and 1% low values.

The 5090 ends up leading the 4090’s 156 FPS AVG by 21% and the 7900 XTX by 50%. The lead against these cards has fallen from the 4K results. 

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

Although we’re in territory where it’s not meaningful for the experience, it’d help us to understand the behavior by looking at 1080p. The framerate still increases, so we weren’t totally bound by the CPU. The 5090 hits 214 FPS AVG, leading the 4090 by 13%. What’s interesting is that the 4090 is now at the same framerate that the 5090 had when the 5090 was at 1440p.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 4K

Cyberpunk is up now. We’re testing the Phantom Liberty expansion in-game in the expansion area.

The RTX 5090 ran at 95 FPS AVG, with lows at an impressive 81 FPS 1% and 77 FPS 0.1%. These lows are excellent numbers and similar to what we saw in Black Myth: Wukong, where the 5090’s lows are outperforming the 4090’s average. The improvement in average FPS was large at 50%, moving from 64 FPS AVG on the RTX 4090. This is the biggest gain we’ve come across so far. Cyberpunk is very particular though and sensitive to areas of the game. Checking with Wendell, his Level1 Techs team saw similarly huge uplift.

The RTX 4090 had a large 32% lead over the RTX 4080 already. As for the older cards, the 5090 and 3090 Ti are in entirely different classes. The 2080 Ti is down at 27 FPS AVG and struggling to run, although to its credit, its frametime pacing in relation to the average is excellent -- it’s just that the framerate is low.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 ran at 181 FPS AVG, with lows at 126 and 108. The RTX 4090 held a 137 FPS AVG, with the advantage of the 5090 being reduced to a still respectable but lower 33%. The 7900 XTX ran at 120 FPS AVG here, which has remained a good result considering the price of the 7900 XTX as compared to its neighbors. That story is totally different with RT, though.

The RTX 3090 Ti ran at 91 FPS AVG, with the 2080 Ti at 57 FPS AVG.

We were fully CPU bound at 1080p, so we’ll skip it.

Dying Light 2 - 4K

Dying Light 2 at 4K is another heavy load for these GPUs. The RTX 5090 shows a familiar scenario of the 1% lows and 0.1% lows, which represent the slowest frames in our test passes, outperforming the average framerate of the RTX 4090. NVIDIA has managed to move the needle for at least the flagships, which we think is partly thanks to cache and memory configuration changes.

The 5090 leads the 4090 by 38%, another impressive jaunt not distant from what we saw with Phantom Liberty. The 7900 XTX did OK in this test as compared to the 4080. The 5090 runs 74% higher average framerate than the 7900 XTX and also costs about 127% more, depending on what price the XTX is. For professional users though, the memory benefit isn’t accounted for in almost any gaming scenarios we test and would be in other applications.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 holds a 216 FPS AVG against the 4090’s 173. This has the 5090 25% ahead of the RTX 4090, down from its lead of 38% at 4K. We won’t burn chart time on it, but 1080p is only about 15 FPS higher, so part of this reduction in scaling is because we’re starting to approach the CPU limit.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up next, first rasterized and at 4K.

The RTX 5090 landed at 207 FPS AVG here, with lows running higher as a result of consistent frame pacing. The end result is a lead over the 151 FPS AVG of the 4090 by 37%, a lead over the 7900 XTX of 64%, and lead over the 4080 of 101%. Against prior flagships, the 3090 Ti landed at 89 FPS AVG, giving the 5090 an uplift of 133%.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 continued scaling and hit almost 350 FPS AVG, with lows that are at ridiculous levels with 281 FPS 1%. This puts the 5090’s average framerate 25% ahead of the 4090’s average framerate, so we’re seeing a reduction from the 37% at 4K, consistent with what we’ve seen elsewhere.

The 7900 XTX held on at 232 FPS AVG here, followed by cards like the 3090 Ti at 162 FPS and 2080 Ti at 92 FPS AVG.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

At 1080p, we see there was still scaling all the way up to almost 400 FPS AVG, which is crazy. This has reset our expectations of where the CPU ceiling is. If anything, this is showing just how good the 9800X3D is for keeping up so well.

The gap between the 5090 and 4090 is around 9% here, so we are actually hitting external limits.

RTX 5090 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

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And now we’re moving to ray tracing benchmarking. This contains games like Black Myth and Cyberpunk, which tend to favor NVIDIA, and games like Resident Evil, Dying Light, and Dragon’s Dogma, which give some more variety.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 4K

Black Myth is first. This is an experimental chart, so once again, our disclosure is that experimental charts have a greater risk of unexpected results as we are still researching its behaviors. This particular title is considered experimental in our test suite because its performance leans so heavily in one direction that we want to slowly accumulate results to explore it further.

The 5090 ran at 88 FPS AVG at 4K, outperforming the RTX 4090’s 65 FPS AVG result by 36%. That’s a big jump. This is with upscaling, so it’s not like-for-like with the 4K raster results.

AMD’s 7900 XTX ran at 20 FPS in this title, which is why we say it’s NVIDIA-favored. The 3090 Ti ran at 34 FPS AVG here.

Ray Tracing - Black Myth: Wukong 1080p

Skipping 1440p and going to 1080p with FSR to get more cards on the chart, here’s where we land. The 5090 is at 158 FPS AVG here, leading the 4090’s 120 FPS AVG result by 31%. Against the 3090 Ti, the 5090 leads by 103%, and against the 2080 Ti’s 49 FPS AVG, it’s about a tripling.

The 4070 (watch our review) outperforms the 3090 Ti in this test when using FSR, with the entire top half of the cards outperforming the 7900 XTX. This test, again, is heavily favored for NVIDIA with the heavy ray tracing use.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 4K

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up next. Again, we haven’t done a ton of 4K Ray Tracing tests here because it’s such a heavy workload normally, but the RTX 5090 ran at 113 FPS AVG with lows at 97 FPS and 94 FPS. The 4090 landed at around 85 FPS AVG, giving the 5090 an uplift of 33%. The RX 7900 XTX does better in this game compared to Black Myth, instead outperforming the RTX 4080 and 3090 Ti, the latter of which is at 55 FPS AVG.

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1440p

At 1440p, the 5090 jumped to 165 FPS AVG and the 4090 held 136 FPS AVG, still keeping about a 30 FPS gap between them, or an improvement generationally of 22%. The uplift has fallen as compared to 4K, keeping with prior trends. The 7900 XTX does similarly here to last time, landing just ahead of the RTX 4080 (watch our review).

Ray Tracing - Dragon’s Dogma 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 5090 continues to climb to 194 FPS AVG, reducing the generational uplift to 15% over the 4090. Let’s move on to something more interesting.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 4K

Here’s Dying Light 2 ray-traced. Again, we haven’t historically run 4K here because only the 4090 and 4080 could be argued as capable. It looks like this next generation of hardware -- and hopefully that also includes AMD’s next card -- is changing that. The RTX 5090 ran at 109 FPS AVG, leading the 80 FPS result of the 4090 by 37%. The 7900 XTX is led by 137%. AMD has publicly claimed that its next generation will significantly improve upon this, so we’ll see where they land probably closer to March.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1440p

At 1440p, the RTX 5090 ran at 176 FPS AVG and held lows of 152 and 126. The 176 result has it about 40 FPS, or 29%, ahead of the RTX 4090. The 4080 hit 104 FPS AVG with the 3090 Ti at 88 FPS. Our 2080 Ti was approaching a decent framerate, but still falling short at 46 FPS AVG.

Ray Tracing - Dying Light 2 1080p

At 1080p, the 5090 held 224 FPS AVG, mostly establishing that we weren’t bound previously by the CPU. So when it was at 4K, the scaling was a 37% generational improvement, then 29% at 1440p, and now is 24.5% at 1080p. The reduction from 1440p to 1080p isn’t as big as we might expect from other tests, probably because there remains enough GPU load to where the CPU isn’t heavily taxed.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 4K

Resident Evil 4 with Ray Tracing is up now, tested at 4K first. The 5090 ran at 210 FPS AVG using FSR as defined in the chart title. The 160 FPS RTX 4090 result establishes a 31% generational improvement favoring the 5090.

The lead over the 7900 XTX is 56%, with the improvement on the 3090 Ti at 113%.

Ray Tracing - Resident Evil 4 1440p

We’ll keep this short: At 1440p, the RTX 5090’s lead falls to 23% over the 4090. This trend is consistent.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Ultra

Cyberpunk with RT Ultra at 4K is heavy even for the RTX 5090 when not using some form of upscaling, which we toggle off in testing specifically because of how unreliable Cyberpunk’s sticky settings are. The 53 FPS AVG puts the 5090 35% ahead of the 4090’s 39 FPS AVG result, remaining consistent with prior tests. The poor, old 2080 Ti nearly burst into flames trying to run this, holding an 8.8 FPS AVG as it crawled across the finish line.

Ray Tracing - Cyberpunk 4K RT Medium

4K with RT Medium is interesting. Dropping from Ultra to Medium predictably increased performance, but grew the gap between the cards with a 59 FPS AVG and 40 FPS AVG result.

RTX 5090 Efficiency Benchmarks

Now we’re getting into efficiency benchmarking and idle power consumption. For this, although we tested a lot of games, we’re going to simplify the charts and just look at a couple of game tests plus idle. These convey the whole story pretty well.

Testing is done by measuring the GPU power consumption at the PCIe cables and the PCIe slot with an interposer. Although we initially had trouble getting the card to work on the riser due to PCIe generation differences, in the final hours before going live, we found a solution to measure through the riser. This testing eliminates the remainder of system power consumption, so we’re isolating for just the GPU.

RTX 5090 Power Consumption: Idle

Testing idle power consumption, the RTX 5090 FE landed at 46W on the desktop with our benchmarking approach. The RTX 5090 FE measured lower in idle power draw than the Arc A580 (read our review) and about the same as the A750 (read our revisit). Even just sitting there, it’s drawing a good amount of power. Our testing uses Windows High Performance power plan for benchmarking performance, so switching to Balanced may help reduce this; however, we use that plan for all tests, so these are like-for-like comparable. We measured the RTX 4090 at 28-29W. The 5090 has relatively high idle power consumption with our test approach and this is an area where there’s clearly some room for improvement if only judging by the 4090, although the power consumption of the TDP is higher on this card.

Efficiency: FFXIV 4K

Final Fantasy 14 at 4K is low on results since we just started using this for efficiency for this launch. The RTX 4090 was the most efficient here, at 391.7 W to produce 138-139 FPS AVG. That puts it at 0.35 FPS/W. The RTX 5090 FE was efficient as compared to the other cards we’ve tested here, but technically worse off than the 4090. Realistically, they’re about the same. Despite framerate improving by 31%, the power consumption also increased by 37%. The end result is reduced or equal efficiency versus the last generation. This might be why NVIDIA is pushing the narrative so hard that MFG improves efficiency, except that’s like saying “why compare apples to apples when you can compare apples to oranges?”

In the very least, against the 3090 Ti in a like-for-like comparison, we can see clear and massive iterative improvements.

Efficiency: FFXIV 1440p

We’re showing 1440p to get a wider selection of cards, though the lighter load won’t look better for the 5090. The RTX 5090 ended up around 520W average for this work, landing it at 0.61 FPS/W. Efficiency is down comparatively overall since we saw the performance advantage also go down when at 1440p. The card should show the best gains in heavy 4K/RT workloads like F1.

Efficiency: F1 24 4K

Here’s F1 24 at 4K and with ray tracing.

On a technicality, the RTX 5090 is the most efficient in this test. It pulled 569W on average during testing and had spikes up to 580-590W, and because of the framerate advantage over the RTX 4090 with its 428W draw, it ends up at 0.21 FPS/W instead of 0.20. This isn’t particularly exciting and we have to highlight that NVIDIA’s claims of efficiency improvements largely centered around artificially generating frames, which isn’t like-for-like because the frame itself may not be the same or comparable.

RTX 5090 Conclusion

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First of all, we need to start with NVIDIA’s complete bulls*** marketing. Unfortunately, NVIDIA just couldn’t help itself except to unfairly misrepresent its RTX 5090’s performance in the following slide on its site.

This image shows the RTX 5090 as being 2x faster than the RTX 4090 regularly, but as you all know from the review you just read, that’s not true. This image doesn’t say “different DLSS versions where we needlessly compare apples to oranges even though we have nothing to be shy of if we tested properly, it says “Performance.” And the accompanying caption isn’t even part of the image. Just saying “Performance” while making big 2x bars makes the 5090 look 2x better than the 4090. NVIDIA technically lists the DLSS version in the bottom, but most people don’t know what that means. Most people don’t know that writing “DLSS 4” under BOTH bars of the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 isn’t actually the same setting. DLSS 4 does not do the same thing on both of these devices. NVIDIA’s own line of gray text that blends into the background at nearly the same color states the test configuration. This states that Frame Gen was used on the 40 series and 4X multi-frame gen was used on the 50 series, which isn’t like-for-like. NVIDIA is generating more artificial frames per real frame on the 5090 than the 4090, but they just list “DLSS 4” under the bars instead of making it clear.

NVIDIA didn’t have to do any of this, but between this insane reach of marketing and the claim CEO Jensen Huang made about an RTX 5070 performing the same as an RTX 4090, it comes across like NVIDIA feels like it isn’t good enough on its own. It has to put a bunch of makeup on the charts to be good enough.

Anyway, enough of the marketing bulls***. The recap is this:

• Know what kind of user you are. Users of VRAM-intensive professional applications should consider the 5090 heavily, but we don’t have data for you today. Maybe in the future. For gaming, anyone who isn’t playing on 4K or higher resolutions won’t get as much relative gain out of this card
• Generally, we saw 27-35% uplift in 4K gaming over the RTX 4090.
• In one instance, we saw 50%
• In one RT instance, we saw 44%
• Most of the time, it hung around 30%
• At 1440p, we saw those drop down into the 20s typically, even when not CPU bound
• The card is one of the most power hungry idle power consumers we’ve tested
• The card is the most power hungry for maximum power consumption and we worry that NVIDIA has elected to continue using 12VHPWR while pushing so close to the limit of the cable spec. We have a full video on the dumpster fire of 12VHPWR and 12v2x6 if you want to learn more
• Efficiency is about the same as the 4090
• Thermal design is excellent, with the FE card impressing us in big ways. That NVIDIA managed to make this 2 slots and still in the 70s while not being ridiculously loud is impressive, and they deserve every bit of credit for that
• As far as value, we’ll be able to more easily talk about that next week when we can review the RTX 5080. For now, NVIDIA is launching the 5090 first, which makes it hard for us to know how close the 5080 gets to the 5090. If the 5080 accomplishes most of the performance but reduces VRAM, that’d be important information for us to have before making a value statement on the 5090, so we’ll wait for now on that

We’ll have a lot more coming up.

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Investigating Reddit's Exploded 9800X3D CPU | AMD Ryzen Post-Mortemjimmy_thang January 21, 2025

We conduct a deep-dive investigation on how a Reddit user’s 9800X3D CPU and MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard exploded

The Highlights

• A Reddit user’s 9800X3D and motherboard incinerated
• We decided to purchase the CPU and mobo to figure out what happened
• Our verdict was that the incident was likely caused by user error

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

We bought a used motherboard that has multiple burn sites, charred plastics, solder that has bubbled through the socket, scorched pins that were discolored by the heat and turned blue, and it’s accompanied by a CPU with a matching damage pattern.

Also, it smells like…magic smoke.
We’re taking a look at a failed 9800X3D CPU that exploded in the socket and motherboard. We’ll dive into what went wrong for a Reddit user who posted it a while back, hopefully providing an educational opportunity and some cool traces of catastrophic damage.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 30, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Editing

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing, Camera

Jeremy Clayton

Video Editing, Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Overview

The used AMD Ryzen 9800X3D and MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard we purchased are heavily damaged and likely totally dead. We bought them from the Reddit user, who posted it to r/pcmasterrace after the incident.

The user said this:

“I built a new PC last night, and I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't POST. When checking for bent pins, I found that it killed itself. :(“

The situation immediately reminded us of the 7800X3D failures following its launch. Since that came down to a fix in the motherboard BIOS, other users naturally started asking questions. When asked about BIOS, the user said:

“I don't know what the BIOS rev. was because it never worked, unfortunately. It has whatever BIOS it shipped with.

It burned up before I ever entered the BIOS. The socket was brand new when I put the chip in, no bent pins or anything.

Edit: Since people have many theories about pins being bent, here are some more photos: https://imgur.com/a/b5x4BVh

The plastic is melted and I think this deformed them. It's a chicken or egg thing.

This was not watercooled and there was no water around this PC.

I don't see any stickers with the BIOS rev on it.”

The above images are some photos the user provided. As you can see, it’s bad. But we have our own evidence and microscope shots to get into because the Reddit user was willing to sell us the components.

The root cause last time, back with the 7800X3D, mainly came down to excessive voltage over an extended period of time, possibly in conjunction with poor internal thermal protections, and motherboard overcurrent protection (OCP) being set way too high. This led to dielectric layer breakdown at the transistor level in a runaway failure state, causing shorts and internal temperatures hitting the point of melting silicon.

In simple terms, too big zap force make CPU go boom.

Ultimately, the issue was fixed via BIOS updates leveraging stricter controls around VSOC, as handed down from AMD to the board manufacturers.

But this new failure likely isn’t the same. 

A lot of the internet pointed toward some potential user-caused damage from improper installation. We had some tell us not to buy the part as they were worried we’d be paying for someone’s mistake. While we really appreciate the concern, it’s the audience that puts us in a position to be able to afford to buy out catastrophic failures like this when they happen. We view it as part of the business: If there’s a chance of something educational coming out of it, we want to be there to learn it. Worst case, some guy installed his CPU wrong and he gets helped out, never makes the mistake again, and we all get some cool shots of a crazy failure. 

Best case: You never know when someone has discovered the next massive failure that could affect thousands of users in an anti-consumer cascade, like Intel’s instability, and it’s important for us to treat all of these events seriously and get the parts before they disappear into the hands of manufacturers with motive and opportunity to hide the results. Third-party investigation is important to transparency.

So, that’s why we’re OK with spending money on something that unveils nothing every now and then, because every time it unveils something important, we can help keep a company honest. And when it doesn’t, someone at least got a bailout.

Let’s get into the damage report.

Damage Report

The bottom of the 9800X3D (read our review) has two major burn sites with discoloration, charring, a hardened, enamel-like substance, and individual points of concentrated scorching where the tips of the LGA socket pins were located. Also, it smells bad.

The motherboard’s socket has damaged areas directly matching the pattern from the bottom of the CPU. The pins themselves are slightly bent out of alignment and discolored, with a few showing an intense bluing as seen on heat-treated metal. Solder from under the socket flowed up onto some of the pins, and the bed of plastic is scorched, appearing molten. There’s also one pin near the bottom that’s badly bent over, without visible burn marks. It, too, smells bad.

The plastic edge of the socket is damaged in two major locations. The bottom left corner shows marring along a slight angle on both the left and bottom borders of the socket area. Along the bottom edge, the plastic alignment pin is clearly misshapen, appearing crushed.

Moving to the bottom of the socket actuation mechanism (SAM, as AMD calls it, also known as ILM in Intel-speak), the hole in the base shows two points of physical wear accompanied by discoloration on the PCB itself. This area differs in design between the AM5 socket manufactured by Foxconn, which this is, and the other AM5 socket, made by Lotes. We’ll get into that later.

A final sign of damage is a missing chunk of plastic between pins 3 and 4 on the ATX 24-pin header, which we wouldn’t have expected.

In technical terms, this board is f***ed up.

We haven’t observed any damage to the back side of the board underneath the socket or anywhere else. That includes the top part of the SAM, which some people thought looked bent in the user’s photos. It is not bent. That may have been lighting and those users are incorrect.

The CPU and motherboard are irreversibly and catastrophically damaged.

Knowing all of the aftermath, we need some testimony.

Other key pieces of first-hand testimony from the Reddit user include the following:

In reference to the pins, the user said, “They were definitely not bent prior to installing the CPU. The CPU is bulging where it's burnt and the mobo socket is slightly melted.”

When asked if all power cables were plugged in, the user replied, “Yes everything was in place. I checked all connections when it wouldn't post and everything was fine. Nothing was in the socket when I put the chip in. That was the first time it was ever opened.

I did not update BIOS prior to trying to boot.”

This is about the time we stepped in, offering to purchase the parts from the user for their full retail price.

Hypothesis

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Moving on to our hypothesis, we thought that the cause of this failure was a dead short to ground, and not an inherent flaw in the CPU or the motherboard BIOS.

We thought this could have happened two ways and kept an open mind.

Option one would be a defect in the socket or the motherboard as a whole – manufacturers can always screw up. If the factory misaligned the socket in relation to the underlying PCB, or damaged the plastic surround of the socket, then it could have led to misalignment and a short.

Option two is improper installation. If the user installed the CPU into the motherboard in such a way that caused the outer socket damage and misalignment of the CPU in relation to the socket pins, then that would be sufficient to cause a short as well.

Detailed Support and Evidence

It’s possible that the issue was caused by something else we can’t account for, but given the evidence we have, we believe that improper installation is the most likely cause.

Now for the details and evidence to support our hypothesis.

The CPU appears to have been installed with an offset within the socket by ~1.01mm diagonally to the left and down at the bottom edge where the socket’s lower guide pin is. This is enough to cause the pins to mate with the wrong pads.

To determine this, Jeremy on our team took a measurement based on converting the known width of the guide pin (1.3mm) and then pixel measuring the microscope shots by pixel counting.

It took a while. There’s a lot of pixels.

This got us the distance between where the CPU’s guide cutout is supposed to sit versus where the plastic is crushed on the guide pin, then we converted it to millimeters. It’s not exact, but it’s very close, and establishes the basis of our hypothesis.

This is generally supported by the marred edge of the socket at the bottom left, and possibly faint rounding off along almost the entire bottom interior edge. This would also result in the bottom edge of the CPU being raised away from the socket in the Z-axis, adding light or poor pin-to-pad contact into the mix, i.e., higher resistance.

Taking a closer look at the bottom of the CPU shows that it was rotated by 1.0-1.4° clockwise, relative to the socket, when the burn occurred. This is based on the pattern of pinpoint scorch marks left by the pins. We carefully inspected the burn marks on the pads where you can see the point of contact, which is evident not only from the natural scratches caused by contact, but by the residue surrounding the burn sites. They should contact the pins in parallel rows, but the marks clearly show an angle. As you go along the pins, you see it diverging. Measuring in software, we came to the 1-1.4 degree offset.

Analysis of the burned pins in the socket shows that all of them are VDDCR (core voltage) pins that are down and/or left of VSS (ground) pins. If the CPU was shifted down and left in relation to the socket, then the burned VDDCR pins would have been in contact with VSS pads on the CPU, causing a catastrophic short circuit.

The fact that the top row of pins in the bottom half of the socket has no burns at all supports this, as those pins would have been in contact with the CPU substrate, not any pads. There’s nothing else conductive to touch in that direction until you get across the gap to the upper field of pads.

That said, not all VDDCR pins that were nearby to ground got burned. We can speculate on a few reasons for this. 

The skewed angle of the CPU in the Z-axis and the unknown pivot point would make the offset inconsistent across the 2D plane of pins. Also, it’s possible that some pads on the single-CCD 9800X3D are not connected internally.

The marring and discoloration where the tip of the SAM (or ILM) touches the motherboard PCB is less conclusive evidence as compared to the rest. 

Best case scenario, it’s just physical wear unrelated to the burning incident. Worst case, it’s a location where core voltage was able to find another path to ground and scorched the PCB.

Finally, the SAM doesn’t show any signs of damage or bending that we can detect. It’s made of springy steel that readily returns to its original state after flexing – assuming it isn’t pushed past elastic deformation into plastic deformation, or in other words, made to permanently bend. 

We think the area suspected of damage in the user’s photo is an optical illusion – a reflection or light shining through the top of the case.

Through all of this, we want to make it clear –  the user shouldn’t be bashed for this. This sort of thing can happen to anyone, and that’s especially true with newer platforms. We’re grateful that the user was willing to sell us the parts to inspect, because we had fun working through the diagnostic.

We’ll use it as a learning opportunity.

Concern about SAM/ILM Styles

All of this led to one observation that we hadn’t realized before that we’d like to briefly cover.

We have a new concern about the two different styles of AM5 socket by Foxconn and Lotes. Research on this piece led us to realize that there are actually a lot of differences between them, in ways that should mostly be immaterial to functionality. 

For example, the Foxconn socket has solid pins and solid plastic, while the Lotes socket has split pins and a more skeletonized plastic molding.

The discoloration on the burned motherboard where the tip of the SAM touches down raises our concern in general, even outside the scope of this piece, because the metal comes in direct contact with the PCB, directly on top of surface-level traces. 

We don’t think this is what happened here, however: Repeated socket actuations could theoretically cause the SAM to abrade through the mask and create a short.

The Lotes version of the socket has the insulation sheet run across this entire hole, adding a barrier of mechanical protection. 

We aren’t saying that the Foxconn socket will have problems, just that we would like to see more conformity to a single style between vendors.

We took a brand-new sample of the same model X870 Tomahawk motherboard and repeatedly opened and shut the SAM 16 times with a CPU in the socket to see if this area of the board would show similar wear or any change at all.

At the beginning of the test, we saw some disturbance of the protective sheet on the left, and a small spot of what looked like adhesive on the right, surrounded by an extremely faint discoloration. At the end of the process, it looked virtually unchanged, and nothing like the burned motherboard.

This pushes us to think these spots were subjected to heat, or maybe a direct short as we mentioned before.

Conclusion

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The short version of this is that, after looking through everything, we think that the result of all this is improper installation, which is something a lot of Reddit users were pointing out when looking at the photos online. 

Regardless, we definitely think this story was worth doing. First of all, it was a lot of fun to piece together a mystery. It also allowed us to possibly learn something major as you never know when some random PC builder might encounter something like the next Intel instability issue, where it might initially be perceived as user error but then proves to be a big, valid issue. 

In this case, this issue doesn’t seem to be something for people to worry about, though users should pay attention to how they're installing their CPUs. It’s possible that a situation like this could have happened if you tried to install the CPU with the motherboard oriented vertically. It’s important to lay the system flat to install it properly and to be careful with where the guides are aligned. You can also slightly wiggle the CPU a bit once it’s installed, but shouldn’t do it hard, to see if there’s something wrong.

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Crazy Bad ASUS Pre-Built Gaming PC for $2500 (G22CH-DH978 Review)jimmy_thang January 20, 2025

We examine the ASUS G22CH-DH978’s setup, pricing, build quality, performance, thermals, acoustics, and more

The Highlights

• The ASUS G22CH-DH978 pre-built is a compact sandwich-style PC with a 14900KF, RTX 4070, and 32GB of RAM
• The PC’s 14900KF was downclocked over 1.3 GHz with no option to change it
• The ASUS ROG G22CH is the worst version of a pre-built that we've ever reviewed
• Original MSRP: $2,500

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

ASUS in its infinite wisdom has made a $2,500 pre-built computer, which absolutely guts the multi-thread performance of the Intel i9-14900KF inside with over 1.3 GIGAHERTZ of frequency drop. They have downclocked it back to the 9th Generation, and it’s objectively the worst delta away from what the CPU should be running at that we’ve ever seen in a pre-built PC. This is the worst version of a pre-built that we've ever reviewed.

And what this tiny ROG pre-built lacks in performance, competent component selection, thermals, and value, it makes up for with its excellent name: This is the ASUS G22CH-DH978.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 28, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing, Camera

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The computer is from ASUS’ self-branded R-REPUBLIC, O-OF, G-GAMERS and spends all of its overhead on the largest don’t-eat-batteries warning we’ve ever seen. This appears to have been made by the R-REPUBLIC O-OF L-LAWYERS. 

ASUS gets its own computer’s dimensions wrong, the retail page calls the side panel “tempered glass” despite it being plastic, and it says the design doesn’t use screws, but it does, and the system is a clown car of component choices with its DDR5-4800 RAM, and it’’s limited power budget for Intel.

It’s got a custom-sized closed-loop liquid cooler in the top under a quick release panel. 

We picked it up at Micro Center for $2,500 – so it’s not cheap – and we ran it through our intense thermal and acoustic benchmarks to see how it stacks up. It does not stack up. It’s... bad.

Overview

Here’s what ASUS’ marketing says about this computer:

“Condensed size. Concentrated Power,” “Compact with an impact,” and “Do more with less.” 

We assume ASUS means less CPU performance, which is accurate.

Despite this focus, ASUS' dimensions for the PC are flat-out lies -- and that’s the easiest thing to get right since it’s literally just measuring the computer.

It claims the G22CH measures at 323x115x287mm and 10L in volume. First of all, that’s 10.6L, not 10L, and 10.6 doesn’t round to 10; secondly, it’s also wrong because the PC actually measures at 324x123x292mm and a volume of 11.6L, which is way different from 10.0. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter because you shouldn’t buy it anyways.

Moving past that, cooling for the CPU is handled by a custom dual 92mm liquid cooler in the top, underneath a quick-release panel. There’s also an air-cooled version, but that’s not what we’re covering today because this computer already doesn’t need any help incinerating its CPU and we certainly don’t want to do that with air.

The ASUS pre-built also comes with an alternative plexiglass panel for the right side to replace the pre-installed metal mesh over the motherboard. The ASUS marketing material on Micro Center’s page explicitly calls it “tempered glass,” which it is not. It's plastic.

Despite being easy to see through the bulls***, it’s hard to see through the panel due to the dark tint. It also has a strange section of text that is literally just the definition of the “Cyberpunk” genre:

“Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that features advanced science and technology in an urban future. CYBER represents the extreme technology of ROG while PUNK represents a culture with attitude and a distinct style. ROG aims to bring our users to the new future by building our brand around CYBERPUNK.”

Nothing says PUNK more than a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to use the technicals of a dictionary to define culture.

One last thing to mention here is that ASUS mentions the PC being a “tool-free” design, saying “you’re able to get into the internals quickly without turning a single screw.” 

There is, however, a single screw that the user does, in fact, have to turn and remove in order to take the top off for the first time.

Good. That’s great... ASUS has really gotten better this year. Just make anything up.

Let’s get to something that ASUS is actually a master of: Pricing.

Pricing

ASUS G22CH-DH978 Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

	Part Name	DIY Equivalent Part	DIY Part Price
CPU	Intel i9-14900KF	14900K / 14900KF	$440
CPU Cooler	ASUS Proprietary 2x92mm Liquid Cooler	Thermalright 240mm CLC	$50
Motherboard	ASUS Proprietary B760	ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-I	$180
Memory	32GB DDR5-4800	32GB DDR5-6000	$80
Storage	1TB NVMe Gen4 SSD	Identical	$50
GPU	ASUS RTX 4070 Dual	RTX 4070	$550
Case	ASUS Custom Case	Lian Li A4-H2O	$155
Power Supply	600W PSU	Cooler Master V SFX 850W	$130
Pre-built Price: $2500	DIY Total: $1635

This is the part and price breakdown of the G22CH-DH978 variant we bought. We used identical parts where possible when building a DIY list, but the ASUS system has a lot of proprietary bulls****, so we picked the closest stuff that made sense for price and kept the general spirit of the build.

ASUS ends up with a premium of around $850-$875 over DIY, depending on day to day price fluctuations. That’s not as bad as the Corsair i500 (watch our review), but is still way beyond what’s reasonable, and is insulting considering the shortcomings of functionally turning the 14900K (read our review) into a lower-spec part.

We always disagree with the use of proprietary or non-standard parts when industry standard parts would work just fine. In this case, ASUS not using a mini-ITX or microATX motherboard kills future upgradability of the PC. Flex ATX PSUs are also available for this form factor – they’re just rare in DIY – ASUS could source one relatively easily at its size.

We take less issue with the custom-sized cooler since it’s matched to the case, but if/when it eventually dies, it will essentially be impossible to replace.

The worst part of the raw spec sheet is the DDR5-4800, which is abysmally slow and will hamper overall performance. You’re paying over $800 for the privilege of bottom-tier launch-spec DDR5 from 2021. The price difference is negligible for a 32GB kit: 4800 starts around $70, 5600 starts at $75, and 6000 can be bought for $80.

And none of that is even the bad part. The largest objective issue (aside from price) is in CPU performance. 

Benchmarks

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CPU Frequency

Here’s a frequency chart comparing the 14900KF in the ASUS computer to frequency data for the 14900K gathered in our original review.

Average P-core frequency is 855 MHz BELOW spec at PL2, and a staggering, actually unbelievable 1,330 MHz down at PL1. This actually reduces a 14900K to under 4 GHz, which is crazy. The Intel 2700K boosted to 3.9GHz – (the same speed) 13 years ago in 2011. Now, architecturally, these are pretty different -- so we can look to the 14900K’s familial heritage in the $70 i3-12100F (watch our review), which boosts to 4.3 GHz.

E-cores don’t fare much better, also falling behind by over 1 GHz relative to stock. This is insane and is the worst setup we’ve ever seen.

Frequency Over Time

This chart shows that the system is clearly set up for the CPU to actually apply Tau (the PL2 duration limit). It exhibits different frequency behavior over time, dropping off a small cliff just after the 80 second mark. The P-core average falls below the stock E-core average frequency. It’s actually disastrously bad.

It’s all a direct result of ASUS slashing the power budget of the 14900KF to about 125W, or half of what it should be.

CPU Performance in Blender

This has a huge negative impact on multi-thread performance. The chart above shows the completion time of our standard Blender rendering benchmark.

The properly configured 14900K completed the task in 8.5 minutes, while ASUS’ configuration of the same CPU required 10.9 minutes. The stock result reduces the time requirement to complete the render by 22%. ASUS set this up so poorly that it made the 14900K perform the same as a 13700K in real-world rendering performance. The 13700K (watch our review) can occasionally be found for $295 and is performing equivalently to the $484 14900K that ASUS sells you.

Tear-Down

ASUS claims that the PC doesn’t require any tools, but you’ll need a Phillips screwdriver to remove a screw on the back.

Doing so allows you to pop off the top and sides of the case.

The side panels have a lot of steel and are pretty heavy.

Removing the other side panel reveals the proprietary motherboard along with SO-DIMM RAM coupled with a socketable CPU. We can also see small heat sinks on the NVMe drive, VRM, and chipset. 

The PC also has a daughter board that offers a PCIe slot for the video card.

The PC has a radiator up at the top, which is a unique shape. Its width measures approximately 95 mm, which is atypical, though its approximate 27 mm thickness is pretty standard. 

With its design, ASUS completely obstructs the front panel and its floor offers little in the way of airflow, despite having a small intake fan near the bottom front of the build. 

The power supply, which is on the back and bottom of the PC, has a small exhaust fan, but doesn’t get much air to pull from.  

The strange cable pictured above is for the front IO, which has another daughter board that provides more USB ports and audio headers.

One bright side to the build is that ASUS at least peeled the tape off the NVMe heatsink. 

We also saw random silver sharpie bits on every screw in the system. Fortunately, we didn’t find any loose screws in the case.

Remove the cooler, the torque was good on the screws. The application of the thermal paste also looked good. 

Packaging

Despite being purchased in-store at Micro Center and therefore not requiring sturdy packaging, it probably could have been shipped as-is without issues. The outer box contains the accessories and four foam corners that suspend an inner box with a handle, which levers open and raises up like a pedestal. There’s a cardboard and foam sled that holds the PC itself inside a fabric bag.

This is maybe one of the few things where ASUS was able to hit a bar of being acceptable.

Accessories

Moving to accessories: The accessory bundle has a super basic mouse and keyboard that aren’t good, wireless antennae, AC power cord, and the extra NOT-tempered-glass “plexiglass” panel. There’s also a box of paperwork with an installation guide, a very large don’t-eat-battery sticker, and panel replacement instructions. 

In what is one of the most basic mistakes, the install guide shows connecting the monitor to the motherboard HDMI port and doesn’t even have a GPU installed in the drawing. This is bad and misleading to a novice user. It’s especially weird since even the worst pre-builts we’ve ever reviewed get this step right since incorrect display header usage leads to high support volume.

Replacing the side panel is annoying. First, you remove the “tool-free” top panel without a single screw…by using a tool to remove the single screw under a rubber cover before sliding the side panel up. Then, you use two tools to remove 14 screws (of 3 different varieties with both PH1 and PH0 heads) from the side panel insert. Installation is the reverse, leaving the PC with a plain-looking and very dark tinted side panel without ventilation.

BIOS

If you didn’t have enough reasons to not buy this computer, we’ll move to BIOS.

On first boot, the G22CH restarted twice, so 3 attempts total just to turn it on. This isn’t entirely unheard of but is strange for a system that runs JEDEC spec memory and was behaving as if it had never been powered on after install. 

BIOS version 404 indicates that important Intel microcode updates are not found, since the build date of November 2023 long predates them. You’d be at risk of Intel’s instability problems. We purchased the pre-built PC in August, so based on ASUS' support page, version 408 of the BIOS had been available for around two months. 

The rest of the BIOS is mundane and lacks any overclocking, power limit, or even memory speed controls. B760 is supposed to have XMP capability, so that’s inexcusable. These restrictions further reinforce the power-hungry 14900KF as a nonsense choice and relegates the board to e-waste. It at least technically works for now, so it’s got that going for it.

One of the only nice things about the BIOS is that the fan headers are labeled well and are fully controllable.

Software and OS Setup

The OS setup also had problems. There’s an ASUS registration prompt at the end of the Windows 11 Out of Box Experience and user information will be shared with McAfee by default unless you uncheck a box, presumably so they can figure out how to make their software even worse.

Upon finally hitting the desktop, we were greeted with a suitably cool/edgy neon R-REPUBLIC O-OF G-GAMERS wallpaper. There weren’t any popups, but the start menu had the full complement of ASUS bloat: MyASUS, Armoury Crate, Aura Creator, and McAfee, which was the only one actively running in the tray and also the worst of these.

Overall, it’s basically set up just like a laptop that sucks – it just happens to be a desktop that sucks.

The pre-installed NVIDIA GPU driver was from June 2023 – 14 months out of date at the time of purchase. That’s absurdly old and lacks over a year of various feature updates, game compatibility fixes, and optimizations. This would lead to problems for the user if they didn’t get a forced update or didn’t know to do one themselves.

System Thermals - Full Torture

With the amateur-hour software setup out of the way, back to the charts: This chart has thermal results for both the stock mesh side panel and the solid plexiglass.

Generally speaking, the system managed to keep itself cool because it is underclocking itself into oblivion, and by that, we mean into frequencies that were common when The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion launched. 

Given that restriction, CPU P-core average temperature peaked at 68-69 degrees Celsius with the solid side panel installed. Sticking with the stock mesh panel gave roughly 1 degree lower temps across both the CPU and SSD. ASUS could have safely allowed a moderately higher power limit given the 20 or so degrees of headroom. It’s possible that the motherboard VRM is also a limiting factor.

Interestingly, the solid side panel gave a very slight – but insignificant – advantage to GPU thermals. It’s likely that increasing the resistance to airflow on the CPU side of the case forced more air to be drawn from the GPU chamber, therefore removing hot GPU exhaust faster.

Memory SPD hub temperatures show the same favor, which is something we’ve seen before in ITX case reviews when the airflow path is such that air is forced to flow directly over the RAM.

Acoustics

We also brought the system into our hemi-anechoic chamber for acoustic analysis. We built this chamber last year with help from all of you in the audience who’ve supported us via Patreon and the GN Store and have gotten heavy use of it since its construction. Thanks for your support.

The system operated in somewhat of a stairstep pattern for its fan control: You can see these relatively quick changes at roughly 375 and 700 seconds into the test. Noise levels settled in around 31.9dBA at steady-state thermals.

We aren’t able to see how the fans would behave under an actual heavy load because of the aforementioned CPU power limit.

Even though these noise levels aren’t bad purely by the dBA number, the quality of the noise is bad. Our noise sample exhibits an annoying low hum at idle that reminds us of a mini fridge. Take a listen here.

ASUS ROG G22CH Conclusion

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The ASUS G22CH-DH978 isn’t remotely worth buying. The $850+ price premium over DIY essentially overrides any hopes the system had right off the bat. The custom SFF arrangement is not special enough to warrant the cost based on “cool factor” alone. It would need to both not suck, and have truly custom water cooling to even approach sensibility.

ASUS shouldn’t offer this flagship CPU choice if it’s just going to cut the thing off at the knees like this. Gaming-only scenarios wouldn’t show the hit as severely, but it’s still wasteful and passes expense on to the customer for no benefit.

ASUS added insult to injury by horribly crippling the performance of the 14900KF through a 125W power limit that isn’t even changeable in BIOS. It’s another scenario like with the Corsair i500 where the SI should have either built a system capable of running a power-hungry flagship CPU, or just not offered it to begin with. The performance in Blender showed it literally tied with the cheaper and older 13700K.

The proprietary parts are another big mark against it, especially the motherboard, which should have just been standardized to ITX or mATX.

Ignoring everything else, we don’t hate the basic idea – it’s very compact and sandwich layouts with liquid cooling are a proven successful archetype as evidenced by cases like the Era 2 and A4-H2O. The custom-sized liquid cooler is capable of dissipating at least 125W with about 20C of headroom without getting loud, so it could probably handle a 13600K (watch our review). An AMD X3D CPU would have been the obvious best choice for a gaming-focused SFF pre-built, given the generally massive advantage in efficiency they bring.

All that said, the price is just too high. Sometimes you have to pay a little more for less in the small form factor market, but this is beyond saving.

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One of the Best Pre-Built PCs We've Reviewed: $1700 Thermaltake Vista 470Mjimmy_thang January 16, 2025

We examine Thermaltake’s Vista 470M’s build quality, value, software, power, thermals, acoustics, and more

The Highlights

• Our build came with an 7800X3D, 4070 Super, and Thermaltake View 380 case
• Out unit had 2 loose RGB headers and a slightly bent pin
• The Thermaltake Vista 470M is a surprisingly good pre-built PC
• Original MSRP: $1,700 (approximately)
• Release Date: October 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Between rental PCs, pre-built disasters, and just bad value, we’ve had a hard time finding good pre-builts over the last few years. We specifically went hunting to actively try and find one of the better mainstream options on the market. 
We bought the Thermaltake Vista 470M for around $1,700 and, surprisingly, it’s actually pretty good. This system has an AMD 7800X3D, which is already a huge improvement on most SIs still offering primarily Intel from some prehistoric marketing collaborations. It’s also priced reasonably.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 19, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing

Mike Gaglione

Testing, Writing

Jeremy Clayton

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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We’ve never looked at a Thermaltake pre-built before, but they’ve been building them for a few years now. This one just launched at the start of October. It’s the Vista 470M, from the LCGS (Liquid Cooled Gaming System) brand of custom and pre-built PCs.

It’s got reasonable pricing and mostly good build quality. That “mostly” is because despite overall great cable management, Thermaltake managed to seriously bend one of the RGB connections to the motherboard – that’s one way to keep the terrible lock-lacking 4-pin from going anywhere, unintentional as this is. The system is also running relatively slow RAM, but sadly, in the prebuilt world, these types of complaints are relatively minor.

But in spite of this, we actually kind of like this system. That’s probably the highest praise we’ve given a prebuilt other than the Starforge systems we’ve looked at. Maybe that should be our new award category: The highly sought-after “We Actually Kind of Like It” award.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Overview

Marketing is normally loaded with memes, so we’ll start there:

“Embrace the exhilarating promise of domination,” Thermaltake says in surprisingly tame marketing cringe, and that’s about it. The rest of the language is pretty normal: Talk of completing a battle station, edge-to-edge glass, the usual MDF-fueled NVIDIA and AMD branding, and talk of the components. Shockingly, the only thing on this page that was worth making fun of was the exhilarating promise of domination. Once again, for a pre-built, this is already one of the more professional listings.

In the past, we’ve seen Corsair’s no-fewer-than 6 assorted “uncompromised” claims on a PC that embodied the very definition of compromise, so this is good from Thermaltake.

As we write this, Thermaltake is only offering its 470M in the Matcha Green colorway of the dual-chamber View 380 case. There aren't any other options if you don’t like it, but at the very least, it’s a unique color.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Pricing

Pricing for the 470M is pretty good, especially compared to some of the more expensive prebuilts we’ve looked at recently. Here’s the breakdown. We put together a pricing table for the components at the time we bought the system. This doesn’t reflect the newest prices in December, but is from when we actually purchased it.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Part and Price Breakdown | GamersNexus

	Part Name	DIY Equivalent Part	DIY Part Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	Identical	$476
CPU Cooler	Thermaltake 240mm CLC	Identical	$80
Motherboard	ASRock B650M-C	ASRock B650M PG Lightning Wifi	$120
Memory	32GB DDR5-5600	32GB DDR5-6000	$85
Storage	1TB M.2 Gen4 SSD	Identical	$55
GPU	NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super	Identical	$590
Case	Thermaltake View 380 ARGB	Identical	$100
Power Supply	Thermaltake Toughpower GX3 850W	Identical	$85
Price	$1,700	DIY Price	~$1600

There’s only about $100 of upcharge over DIY part cost, with the usual fluctuations of the DIY market. We think that’s completely reasonable, especially if you value saving time and don’t care as much about assembling it yourself. At the depths of sales, you might find about $200 to $250, but even that is a good price: Starforge was typically around $400 to $650 cost over DIY, with iBUYPOWER and CyberPower typically about $100 to $400, depending on model. 

As always, you could find greater savings by totally swapping some of the components in this list, but we try to compare exact part-for-part in these pricing tables.

It’s not perfect though. The launch of the higher-performing 9800X3D (read our review) at the same price as what the 7800X3D has been available for recently casts somewhat of a shadow on the overall value, but the 7800X3D (watch our review) is still a strong 2nd place in almost all of our gaming tests. Part of the pricing may be explained by Thermaltake getting the remains of the 7800X3D that has become suddenly less desirable.

The DDR5-5600 RAM is also, unfortunately, a terrible choice, given that the “sweet spot” for AM5 is at 6000MT/s and it’s essentially universally compatible across all of the current CPUs. 

It doesn’t even really cost more at this point to get better RAM -- the pricing is similar.

Thermaltake accidentally benefits from the higher cache on the X3D CPU helping to brute force and make up for some of that weaker RAM choice.

The motherboard and power supply are on the lower end, but don’t cross over into truly cheap territory. Also, since it’s 850W, the possibility of a future GPU upgrade is there. 

And because you own the system, unlike NZXT’s envisioned nightmarish dystopian hellscape that is its rental program, you could upgrade it with whatever you wanted.

The ASRock B650M-C is a commercial variant of a consumer board, but thankfully has a publicly accessible support page with BIOS and drivers. This is a huge improvement over what we’ve seen in the past, including Corsair using commercial variant boards without any public BIOS maintenance.

Overall, the parts choice and pricing are better than a lot of the pre-builts we’ve looked at.

Let’s get into the tear-down next.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Tear-Down

Removing a single screw on top of the case allows you to remove the case's side panel.

The backside cabling of the 470M is incredibly clean and reveals a non-modular PSU, which goes to show Thermaltake’s high quality cable management. 

The company hid cables at the bottom of the case behind a cover, which makes sense.

The main interior of the build has a clean assembly, though we did notice 2 loose RGB headers with one of them having a bent pin. It still worked, but that isn’t great.

Thankfully, we didn’t notice any loose screws, which is pretty rare to see.

Our 470M used a lower quality 450-watt 12VHPWR cable for its GPU. Fortunately the GPU in our system, a 4070 Super (read our review), won’t pull something higher like 600 watts, but this will prevent GPU upgrade options, like the 4090 (watch our review). So that’s not great and we would have preferred a 600-watt solution.

With the CPU cooler removed, the paste on the processor looks okay. There was one corner which could have used a little more thermal paste. We can also see there was a lot of force applied to it. Thermally, it was fine in our testing. 

Back to the system review. All of this testing was completed prior to the tear-down.

BIOS, OS Setup, and Software

The BIOS didn’t have any negative surprises, and was set to stock values outside of EXPO being turned on, which is good. This should be the norm, but because companies fail at enabling EXPO and XMP so frequently, it actually becomes the mark of a prodigal system integrator. That’s a sad statement, but experience has unfortunately set low expectations. The only strange thing was the date being set to January 31, 2024, which was easily fixed. The CMOS battery did not seem to be faulty. It just looked to be misconfigured. 

There was nothing else to mention in BIOS, which is good.

Windows setup was normal, thankfully devoid of any third-party software agreements deceptively tacked on at the end. Booting into Windows was clean, without any pop-up app assault. The desktop had a screenshot of a Superposition benchmark result, indicating the system was probably tested prior to packaging. Having a result stored locally for the customer is excellent, as it offers a means to calibrate against the expectation and gives customer support a way to help direct the consumer to a performance gauge.

The only additional software on the system was the ASRock RGB utility, which provides some functionality. There was no bloatware otherwise: No Norton or McAfee, no BS gaming services, and just a clean OS.

The pre-installed NVIDIA graphics driver was version 565.90 from October 1, less than a week prior to our original order date and only three days before the 470M even went on sale. This is awesome to see: Thermaltake might be better about getting the latest version into its builds than some other SIs we’ve looked at – it’s hard to definitively say with only a single data point, but other systems we’ve reviewed have sometimes had very outdated drivers, upwards of 3 or 4 months out of date, which isn’t good.

As a downside: There was a missing driver in Device Manager. Research showed it’s AMD’s 3D V-cache driver. It should be installed but disabled with the 7800X3D. We would like to see it installed, but Thermaltake lucked into the fact that this is a single CCD CPU, so this wasn’t disastrous. It absolutely shouldn’t be missing, but Thermaltake would only truly suffer for it if this were a dual-CCD solution with 3D cache.

Altogether, Thermaltake did a great job with providing a clean BIOS and OS setup with up-to-date drivers. We really didn’t have a lot of complaints here.

We’ll get into benchmarks now.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Benchmarks

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Power - Full Torture

Full system power measured at the wall is up first in our charts. This is captured while the system is running a full CPU plus GPU load with Blender and Port Royal on loop. System power consumption idles at around 60-70W and then climbs to roughly 150W during the brief CPU-only load portion, then jumps over 360W when the GPU joins in. It’s stable overall, and during our steady-state period, results in a 370W average. With an 850W PSU, Thermaltake has gone slightly overkill on the power supply, but not in a bad way. Most power supplies are at peak efficiency somewhere in the 40% to 60% range of utilization for capacity, although it depends on the power supply. 850W gives just enough headroom for an upgrade without increasing cost unnecessarily while also staying within a reasonable efficiency range.

Thermals - Full Torture

Next is a simple bar chart of all thermals at steady-state in the same workload. The GPU has plenty of access to fresh air, keeping itself to 68 degrees Celsius on the core, 75 degrees on the memory, and 80 degrees hotspot. This is all completely fine.

The CPU at steady state is 77 degrees, which is within the expected range for the 7800X3D with a competent 240mm liquid cooler. RAM SPD Hub and SSD temperatures were fine, showing a slight delta between the two RAM sticks. That’s normal.

Thermals are relatively hard to screw-up in this case since it’s so heavily perforated and includes 3 side intake fans, a 240 liquid cooler, and a rear exhaust fan. Thermaltake did not screw them up, so that’s also a good sign. Overall, the cooling configuration is good and performs well for what it is. We don’t have any problems with the CPU or GPU temperatures here.

CPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed - Full Torture

The chart above shows CPU temperature over time and plotted against fan speed. There’s an initial spike in temperature around the 200-second mark, which causes the liquid cooler’s pump (recorded as CPU1) and fan speeds to spike to control it. Outside of that initial burst, the rest of the curve is gradual, without any sudden ramps. This is all good as it should help avoid noticeable, annoying, and sudden changes in noise. Fan hysteresis seems good here.

The cooler fans topped out at 1908 RPM AVG, but the chassis fans only reached 429 RPM AVG. This is so low that we doubt they're contributing much at all to the overall cooling. The system doesn’t really need them to be going faster, but this points to them being improperly configured.

We think it’d be better to boost these speeds at least a couple hundred RPM to make some use of the fans, as currently, they are borderline ornamental at those speeds. It would actually result in a quieter system if Thermaltake slightly dropped the speed of the higher RPM fans and slightly increased the speed of the side fans, as they’d get rid of some of the higher frequencies in the noise spectrum by reducing the higher RPM fans. This would yield a better overall balance for the system than setting a few fans high and the rest so low that they do nearly nothing.

Acoustics - Full Torture

We’ll wrap up the charts with acoustic testing. 

This is done in our hemi-anechoic chamber that we built last year. We’ve been getting a ton of use out of this chamber for testing. The reason we built the chamber is to ensure a consistent test environment day-to-day. You’d be shocked how much daily external noise changes as picked up on decibel meters, and without good controls, we wouldn’t be able to fairly test and evaluate systems against each other from day to day as the conditions would be constantly changing. Our chamber allows us to eliminate external noises that aren’t from the computer, so if there’s a truck outside or some high-pitched wind whistling or something like that, we eliminate all of it with the chamber. That means we are correctly attributing system noise to the system itself, not to our own environmental factors that aren’t present in your situation.

The image above is a plot of dBA over time during the same full system load. The average noise level during idle was 18 dBA. Noise levels during steady-state reached 31.1 dBA. What we’re really looking at here is the ramp: Thermaltake’s system ramped to full noise level over a period of about 10 minutes, which is great. That means Thermaltake isn’t unnecessarily rapidly ramping and de-ramping the fans (other than that initial spike) and is utilizing time to slowly increase the speeds. This would help control noise levels during spikier workloads.

Frequency Spectrum

Here’s a quick frequency spectrum plot with data collected in our acoustic chamber.

The Thermaltake 470M under steady state full load had its largest spikes at the 223 and 380 Hz frequencies, followed by a dip, then another small spike at 500 Hz. Overall, this noise profile is fine. There is a slight spike at 1600-1700 Hz which could be flattened a bit by lowering the pump speed and CPU cooler fan speed slightly, but overall, there’s not a lot to complain about with it.

Packaging

Thermaltake’s packaging was generally pretty good, utilizing the tried and true box-in-a-box method, but with the oddity of using GPU box foam inserts as packing material (and from a different GPU than the one in our system, no less). We have no way to know if this is routine practice or if the warehouse just ran out of the usual stuff – at least it’s recycling. The PC itself was packed inside the case box as usual.

The glass side panel was screwed in for transit, which was good, and was taped to the front glass panel, which was annoying. But at least for the positives, making use of the glass security screw is the correct move and we’re happy to see it get its proper use. 

There was a QR code linking to instructions on how to remove the side panel. This is a bit strange since it’s a lot of extra steps to get to the answer: It technically works, but a simple instructional pictograph would be a lot better since they’re printing and applying a sticker anyway, so applying a sticker with a QR code to basically a single step is a roundabout way of conveying a message in the same space as the code itself.

The inside of the case was well-packed with a mixture of both closed-cell and expanding foams. Thermaltake did an adequate job of protecting the system during shipping. Ours did not sustain any shipping damage. We were overall happy with how this was packaged. 

Accessories

Now for the accessories: The included quick start guide provides an actually helpful primer for setup, especially for novices. Step 1 clearly instructs the user to plug the monitor into the GPU and not the motherboard, which should help prevent the number one easy mistake, and it also notes to flip the PSU switch to on, which should prevent the second most common easy mistake. 

The bag of accessories inside the case has the case manual, SATA cables, WiFi antennae, extra screws, and, curiously, two 12VHPWR adapters. One of them is the official NVIDIA adapter that probably came with the 4070 Super and the other is a mismatched-white that just looks bad. Nothing in the build is white themed, so we assume this was an accidental inclusion. Including the native NVIDIA adapter is good though, as there are a lot of reasons a user may want it in the future. Keeping the card’s accessories with the card is the right move and we’re happy to see it. Some SIs just toss the extras, which could minimally pose issues for second-hand resale when done with the system.

We’re not sure if this is better or worse than the used Sharpie PRO we got from NZXT. We didn’t end up mentioning that in the NZXT video because it didn’t matter compared to the utter trainwreck that Flex is, but we actually got sent a used Sharpie in the accessory box. Maybe it’s a trap so they can charge us for the entire cost of the system if we don’t include the Sharpie upon return.

Anyway, at least in reference to this, Thermaltake is looking good. We were overall satisfied with the accessories included.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Conclusion

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The quick version of the conclusion is this: The Thermaltake Vista 470M pre-built is one of the best we’ve looked at recently, alongside the Starforge Lowkey. It’s also the best value for money we’ve seen since probably the Maingear Vybe in 2022 (watch our review). The upcharge over DIY is only about $100, which is pretty much as good as it gets outside of major SI clearance sales. And even with the more recent sales since we bought the system, it might be at most $200 to $250 upcharge. 

Part selection makes sense outside of the slow DDR5-5600 – matching a still-excellent and efficient last-gen X3D CPU with the upper-midrange 4070 Super. It ends up being a good build. Thermaltake also doesn’t back the user into any corners with something like a proprietary motherboard that won’t get regular BIOS updates, which is good. The 850W PSU leaves overhead for a GPU upgrade down the road.

Now that the 9800X3D is out for effectively the same price, we’d like to see Thermaltake update the SKU with the new CPU and keep MSRP the same.

Build quality is overall good: Cable management was well-done, with the only major negative of the assembly being a bent RGB header.

The system’s setup was also a major positive for Thermaltake. The BIOS was sensibly configured and the Windows 11 install was clean, with impressively fresh GPU drivers. The only oddity there was a missing X3D driver that’s only necessary to the dual CCD parts, which the 7800X3D isn’t. As general best practice, we still like to see all drivers installed and no yellow bangs (!) in the device manager.

Thermals across the whole build are well managed, with CPU and GPU temperatures within expected ranges. Fan curves and acoustics are also good, with the one exception being the chassis fans never ramping up. 

Thermaltake could improve upon its fan configuration by reducing the CPU speeds in the curve and increasing the case panel speeds, which would slightly lower noise and create a more desirable acoustic profile, but with the same thermal results.

We’re overall impressed with this system. After how many bad prebuilts we’ve looked at recently, we specifically went hunting for good ones and bought several. Of those, one was bad -- and that’s coming up soon -- and another coming up looks promising. This one went well. This is our first Thermaltake prebuilt we’ve bought. We’d feel comfortable recommending this one. It’s a big plus to see AMD in use where it makes sense too, as a lot of the system integrators and OEMs are still embedded with Intel.

Well done to Thermaltake. We’ll probably give this system to someone we know since we expect it won’t come back with any problems.

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NVIDIA RTX 5090 at 575 Watts, RTX 5080, 5070 Ti, & 5070 Specsjimmy_thang January 15, 2025

NVIDIA announces 4 Blackwell GPUs and claims that the $549 RTX 5070 is comparable to the RTX 4090

The Highlights

• The RTX 5090 has an MSRP of $2,000
• The RTX 5080 has an MSRP of $1,000
• The RTX 5070 Ti has an MSRP of $750
• The RTX 5070 has an MSRP of $550
• The RTX 5090 and 5080 are listed to release on January 30 and the 5070 Ti and 5070 are set to launch in February

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

NVIDIA today announced its RTX Blackwell family of 50-series GPUs. These include its RTX 5090 at $2,000, the RTX 5080 at $1000, the 5070 Ti at $750, and the RTX 5070 at $550.

NVIDIA claims that its RTX 5070 has “4090 performance at $549,” which is definitely something we will be inspecting. NVIDIA also stated that this is “impossible without AI,” also stating it is “impossible without GDDR7,” which the company is moving to for its 50-series video cards.

Let’s get into the news.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 7, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Host, Writing

Steve Burke

QC

Jeremy Clayton

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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RTX Blackwell

NVIDIA spent a lot of time talking about AI, and we’ll get into some of that briefly at the end.

We’ll start with the hard information that we have.

NVIDIA announced its Blackwell GPU as it’ll arrive to the consumer market in January. The GPU, presumably the full Blackwell die, was noted as a 92 billion transistor solution (as compared to the RTX 4090’s approximate 76 billion).

Notably, the card CEO Jensen Huang showed off at the event appeared to be a 2-slot card, which he noted has 2 fans. This is a stark contrast to the huge prototype NVIDIA cooler we just tore down. This is a big swing from the 3-slot and 4-slot cards we’ve become used to, which were necessary for thermal and power management.

Hard Specs

NVIDIA also posted some of the hard specs to its website.

We can start with the power, which is listed as 575W total graphics power for the 5090. 

That’s a huge amount of load to put on a single 16-pin connector and we’re concerned about the strain on it. We also wonder if this will be coupled with a redesign of coolers to try and actively cool the area of the power connector.

The RTX 5090 Blackwell GPU is listed as having 21,760 CUDA cores, memory at 32 GB of GDDR7, clocks at 2.41 GHz boost and 2.01 GHz base, and a large 512-bit memory interface width. NVIDIA has iterated its Tensor core generation to 5 and its RT core generation to 4 for Blackwell, though we don’t yet have architectural details on what that actually means on the consumer side. We expect those details soon.

The FE card is listed as 304mm by 137mm for dimensions, and 2 slots thick.

Jumping over to the prior RTX 4090 (watch our review) for reference: The 4090 has 16,384 CUDA cores, down notably from the 21,760 of the 5090 -- but cores can’t be linearly compared, especially cross generation, so the real-world impact likely won’t track linearly. The 4090 also ran 24 GB of GDDR6X rather than the 32GB GDDR7 on the 5090. The 4090’s clocks are higher as advertised, though, at 2.52 GHz boost and 2.23 GHz base -- but clocks, like core count, aren’t everything.

Zooming out to look at memory capacity, we see the 5090 at 32 GB, the 5080 at 16 GB, the 5070 Ti at 16 GB, and the 5070 at 12 GB. For perspective, the RTX 4070 (watch our review) is also 12 GB, the 4070 Ti is 12GB, the 4070 Ti Super (read our review) is 16GB, and the 4080 is 16GB.

Going to a fuller look at the specs, the 5080 is listed at 10,752 CUDA Cores, which is slightly more than the RTX 4080’s 9,728 CUDA cores and not the same huge change we see with the 4090 to 5090. The 5070 Ti lists 8960, against 7680 on the 4070 Ti (watch our review), and the 5070 lists 6144, up from 5888 on the 4070 configuration. 

Again, these aren’t directly comparable as they’re different generations, but are useful for establishing how NVIDIA is positioning the cards.

The full specs page shows a 2.62 GHz max boost on the 5080, 2.45 GHz on the 5070 Ti, and 2.51 GHz on the 5070. We already said the 5090 has a larger memory bus. The 5080 and 5070 Ti both run a 256-bit bus, with the 5070 at 192 bits.

Other than the 575W of the 5090, NVIDIA lists the other cards at 360W, 300W, and 250W for total board power. Broadly speaking, NVIDIA’s power consumption appears to be increasing. 

This is good timing with our efficiency testing: It’s possible efficiency is up despite power draw also going up, but that’s what we’ll find out.

First-Party Marketing Claims

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We’ll have our own benchmarks soon enough and you should rely on those or the independent benchmarks of other trusted reviewers. We can still reference NVIDIA’s first-party claims to get an idea for where they stand.

NVIDIA’s webpage has a relative performance chart that’s pretty hard to actually read, but we can get an idea. NVIDIA claims the 5090 outperforms the 4090 by over 2x in some situations, such as with Cyberpunk and Wukong, among others. In these tests, they list “DLSS+Full RT” as the settings. The footnote that’s nearly the same color as the page background says that the 40-series used frame generation in this testing, but the 50 series used MFG 4x mode. This makes the comparison not like-for-like.

We consider this approach flawed, but we’ll look at their other claims for full perspective. Switching to the RTX 5080, NVIDIA shows it as outperforming the RTX 4080 (watch our review) by, again, sometimes 2x -- this is tough to filter through differing settings tested, unfortunately.

The 5070 Ti shows beyond 2x gains against the 4070 Ti in the same way and with the same settings difference, with the 5070 and 4070 showing the same in NVIDIA’s first-party claims.

Of all of these, the Plague Tale comparison is maybe the most fair since NVIDIA notes that it only has DLSS 3.

As for what DLSS 4 actually is, NVIDIA ran this new blog post to introduce it. Of MFG, or Multi-Frame Generation, the post reads, “DLSS Multi Frame Generation generates up to three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame, working in unison with the complete suite of DLSS technologies to multiply frame rates by up to 8X over traditional brute-force rendering.”

The page continues to say, “Our new frame generation AI model is 40% faster, uses 30% less VRAM, and only needs to run once per rendered frame to generate multiple frames. For example, in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, this model provided a 10% faster frame rate, while using 400MB less memory at 4K, max settings, using DLSS Frame Generation.”

This section of the article also indicates that you’ll be able to override the DLSS model used in games that don’t get updates from devs, which is already possible to be done manually by some users who replace .dll files. This new approach looks like it will be more user-friendly.

NVIDIA stated that its Blackwell GPUs will have 2x the memory bandwidth of Ada, at 1.8TB/s for the cited spec, it claimed 2x the the RT TFLOPS, and 1.5x Ada shader performance. 

The PCB showcased was a relatively small square -- like a further cut-down version of the 4090 FE PCB if you were to chop the wings off -- that appears to be sandwiched between two full flow-through fans. 

The design is shown in this explosion diagram where NVIDIA illustrates the PCB centrally with densely populated components on both sides of the board. The cooler also utilizes a vapor chamber cooling solution with what appears to be 5 heatpipes, assuming the render is accurate. The GPU directly contacts the vapor chamber as you would expect, with the flow through area handling the flanking heatsinks.

Uniquely, that appears to take some learnings NVIDIA had from this cooler, which is a full flow-through design. 

AI on GeForce

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NVIDIA also spent limited time talking about other AI features for gaming. Although it is publishing materials to its site, we’ll wait for the full architectural briefing to get into more depth. For now, the company highlighted these:

• RTX Neural Material, wherein it showed an example material cut from 47 MB to 16 MB with this solution.
• DLSS improvements by moving to a Transformer model rather than the previous CNN model.

NVIDIA’s keynote was lengthy and covered topics outside of our typical coverage scope. For now, we’re just focusing on getting these basics out to you and will revisit the other announcements in more depth as we have time to adequately read through all the released materials.

As for release dates: NVIDIA cited January in its keynote, but its website specifically lists January 30th for the RTX 5090 and 5080. It says the 5070 Ti and 5070 will arrive in February.

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, Ryzen 9950X3D, Z2 Extreme SOC for Ally / Legion, & Morejimmy_thang January 14, 2025

We delve into AMD’s CES reveals, which include new CPUs, GPUs and SOCs

The Highlights

• AMD’s GPU reveals include the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT
• AMD’s CPU reveals include the 9950X3D and the 9900X3D
• AMD announced 3 new SOCs: the Z2 Extreme, Z2, and Z2 Go
• AMD also announced a new mobile CPU: The FireRange AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

AMD announced a ton of CPUs, GPUs, and handheld hardware today. The announcements were for the 9950X3D, 9900X3D, Ryzen Z2 SOC for handhelds such as the ROG Ally, and RDNA 4 GPUs like the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. AMD also announced a number of mobile CPUs. Our focus will be on RDNA 4 and the new Zen 5 X3D parts alongside the handheld SOC.

AMD 9070 XT & 9070

We’ll start with AMD’s GPU news since it’ll be the quickest.

Editor's note: This was originally published on January 6, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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AMD announced the existence of its Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT today, noting Q1 2025 availability.

Specs are extremely limited right now. The company did picture several partner model cards in its announcement slide, including at least one that looks like a Yeston model, an ASRock model, XFX, and all the others listed. The cards pictured above are generally 3-slot coolers that are 2-3 slots thick.

AMD says the GPUs will use its RDNA 4 architecture and will utilize a 4nm process from TSMC. AMD mostly described its specs with adjectives, which is unfortunately not particularly useful. Words like “optimized compute units,” “supercharged AI compute,” and “improved raytracing per CU” don’t tell us a whole lot. We’ll have to wait for that information.

Likewise, AMD announced that FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR4, will be released and has been built for RDNA 4. It intends to re-launch its Anti-Lag software solution that was intended to compete with Reflex, now in its Anti-Lag 2 iteration. We were not pre-briefed with any further information than this at the time of briefing.

The company is clearly self-aware, as it also presented a slide about its naming choices for the RX 9070 series. Go figure. The slide above shows that AMD intends to line-up the 9070 series, including both XT and non-XT models, with the RX 7900 XT down to the middle of the RX 7800 XT (read our review), whatever that means. The worst 9070 is apparently half of one RX 7800 XT -- or maybe that means 1.5 7800 XTs? All we’re missing is a note telling us that the image is not to scale.

Anyway, against NVIDIA, this roughly positions the 9070 series as comparable, according to this image, to the 4070 Ti (watch our review) and 4070 Super (read our review). We won’t get out our scrying stones for this hastily thrown-together image since it’s hard to judge without real numbers, but that’s at least how AMD seems to be positioning it.

The company claims the change is to line-up with its Ryzen 9000 CPUs and says it will reserve 8000 naming for its mobile CPUs.

AMD CPUs

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On the CPU side, AMD’s two new desktop CPUs are predictable: The 9950X3D and the 9900X3D, which use the Zen 5 architecture that shipped at the end of last year and follow-up the wildly successful 9800X3D. The 9800X3D has been constantly out of stock due to the demand.

The 9950X3D is a 16C/32T part that advertises a maximum boost frequency of “up to 5.7GHz,” noting a 144MB total cache size. At the time of writing this, AMD has not provided pricing details or a specific release date beyond sometime within the next few months. 

For comparison, the 9800X3D (read our review) has a total 104MB cache and $480 MSRP. The advertised boost of the 9800X3D is 5.2GHz, so the 9950X3D has a greater cache size and may benefit from higher boosting. The 144MB cache on the 9950X3D comes from the additional CCD in the configuration and could have some specific benefits that we’ll explore in our eventual review. 

The 9900X3D is a 12C/24T component that advertises up to a 5.5 GHz boost max. It has a 140MB total cache. The 9950X3D runs a 170W TDP, with the 9900X3D at 120W. The 9800X3D is also 120W. Because of this, the 9800X3D may benefit from additional power available during fully loaded workloads. There could be some shuffling of the CPU stack in specific benchmarks due to the power budget differences.

AMD’s updated chipset drivers should more intelligently park CCDs and, in theory, should make it easier to upgrade in-socket without needing to blow away the whole OS prior to moving from a single-CCD part to a dual-CCD part. We will still be using isolated SSDs for our reviews, but this should be a benefit for end users who may later seek to upgrade in-socket.

AMD published some first-party claims. As usual, we’ll have our own numbers soon -- as will basically all other reviewers -- and so you should wait for those prior to making decisions. To set the stage for what we’re verifying against, AMD is claiming the following:

AMD says this is “the world’s best gaming processor,” though note that they are comparing it to the 7950X3D (watch our review). The 9950X3D is shown as being on average 8% better across 40 games that AMD tested, with a range of no change to a 58% uplift over baseline compared to the 7950X3D.

AMD also claims that it outperforms the 285K (read our review) by 20% on average across 40 games. We definitely believe this, based on numbers we ran for the 9800X3D and 285K already.

Its first-party numbers also point to performance improvement in Blender, with lesser improvements in Photoshop and Premiere in PugetBench testing against AMD’s own prior processor.

Historically, these CPUs do not necessarily provide significant improvements over the single-CCD X3D CPUs of the same generation. You might see rough equivalence or slight changes in specific games. The primary advantage would be for someone who does a lot of gaming but also wants the additional cores for production workloads. 

The other historical challenge has been behavior with core parking, something we’ve now detailed extensively. While core parking is still a “thing,” AMD says its new chipset drivers should resolve a lot of the past issues.

AMD Z2 SOC

AMD’s Z2 SOC follows-up the Z1 and Z1 Extreme mobile solutions that were found on some handheld devices. AMD has also offered mobile chips like the 7840U and 8840U that have been in handheld devices and are comparable.

The Z2 is light on information: AMD again defers to descriptors like ‘breathtaking” and “exhilarating speed,” which we assume is the next speed setting for a Back to the Future movie. 

It also gets into some business-y stuff, like the addressable market and increase in competition in this market.

As for actual news, the Z2 family comes in 3 variations currently known: The Z2 Extreme, Z2 Go, and the…Z2 non-Extreme, non-Go.

The Z2 Extreme and Z2 are both 8C/16T parts with the same cache and a boost frequency separated only by 100 MHz. The actual change comes in the form of the integrated graphics. This is also where the Z1 and Z1 Extreme deviated most heavily. The configurable TDP allows up to 5W more driven to the Z2 Extreme, which will cost battery life but help power the GPU. The Z2 has a higher boost clock despite a lower cTDP, likely due to overall package budget allocation with the GPU change (and also density).

The Z2 Go is new. This is a 4C/8T part that only boosts to 4.3 GHz maximum advertised, only has 10 MB of cache, keeps the 15-30W cTDP, and keeps the 12 CUs. This CPU is far weaker than the others listed here, especially with that clock drop, so we’re curious to see what types of devices make the best use of it. We’ll also be curious to see battery life and if it can stick closer to that 15W number while still providing meaningful performance.

These are all listed for Q1 2025 availability, so we’ll be busy on our team running handheld benchmarks once again here soon. We ran several reviews last generation and will need to do a total refresh.

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AMD HX3D

We’d like to dedicate this next section to our late friend Gordon Mah Ung, who once joined us to complain about AMD’s mobile CPU naming scheme.

AMD’s new mobile CPU is the FireRange AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D that’s releasing in 1H 2025, and it’s joining the 9955HX and 9850HX mobile parts.

The 9955HX3D is advertised as what AMD claims is the best gaming and content creation part for mobile. We don’t really test mobile, but we certainly use high-end laptops for our travel and might try these out.

The 9955HX3D is a 16C/32T part that boosts up to 5.4GHz. It has 144 MB of cache and a TDP of 54W. The 9955HX is the same, but with less cache. The 9850HX is a 12C/24T part with lower boost, no X3D cache by mercy of its easier name, and the same TDP.

AMD also spent some time on its new “AI” brand name mobile processors, but we’ll leave that to someone else to cover as that’s not really our area of focus.

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Intel At Its Best: Revisiting the i9-12900K, i7-12700K, i5-12600K, 12400, & i3-12100F in 2024jimmy_thang January 6, 2025

We compare Intel’s 12th gen CPUs against newer CPUs in a variety of gaming and productivity benchmarks

The Highlights

• Alder Lake brought a new platform that included new I/O, options for both DDR4 and DDR5 and PCIe Gen5
• Intel’s 12th gen CPUs are no longer chart toppers
• Intel’s 12th series CPUs escaped the company’s 13th and 14th gen issues

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

We’re revisiting Intel’s best recent CPUs right now. Intel Alder Lake managed to escape the 13th & 14th “Gen” issues without a scratch while also being the start to this era of CPUs. They can socket into the same motherboard as a 14900K in many instances and are somehow even still available for (sometimes) reasonable prices. Recently, the 12900K was as low as $120 from Best Buy as it got purged from inventory.
In this article, we’re revisiting the 12900K (watch our review), 12700K via our KF, the 12600K, 12400, and 12100F.

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 17, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing, Video Editing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Mike Gaglione

Video Editing

Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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As a quick reminder of the history of these parts, this is what we thought of them back when they launched: “This is an excellent first volley from Intel with Alder Lake. It is on the expensive side. Price has crept up, performance, fortunately, has also crept up but so too has power. You get some new and exciting technologies with Alder Lake; DDR5 being one of them. Ultimately, it's about how this competes and this has surprisingly decent value when compared to the 5900X (watch our review) and the 5950X (watch our review), especially in production workloads. There are places where AMD still holds an advantage but they have gotten slimmer.”

That was for the 12900K. For the 12100F (watch our review), we were also relatively positive: “At $130, it's actually a pretty exciting CPU for us to review because, for gaming, it did very well. And even with a high-end GPU, it's doing pretty well, so we were impressed with its gaming performance.”

It feels weird to revisit our old reviews because we were really excited about what Intel was doing at the time. It was fiercely competitive. 

It’s easy to forget how positive we were on some of Intel’s launches back from the 8000 series into the 12th Gen with Alder Lake when looking at the last few rounds. The 13 and 14 series CPUs were largely refreshes, but Alder Lake brought a new platform forward with new I/O, including options for both DDR4 and DDR5 and PCIe Gen5.

AMD had also forsaken its budget market at this time: Going back through our old reviews, we were reminded of how AMD had gotten so comfortable in its position that it had stopped the 5000 series briefly at the 5600X (watch our review) levels. They introduced the 5600 (watch our review) to help with this, but overall, AMD’s pricing was much higher than it had been in the preceding generations. That left Intel with a huge gap to fill with its 12100F, which later went on to land on our Best CPUs of the Year awards list for at least 2 years for its viability as a true budget gaming part.

So that’s the history. These CPUs were exciting. 

For this revisit, to make space on the charts so they are somewhat legible, we’re removing the 7900 non-X, 7700 non-X (watch our review), and 7950X (watch our review) ECO Mode results from gaming benchmarks. You can find all these numbers in our 9800X3D review or 7600X3D CPU review if you’d like them. They are directly comparable.

That’s enough of a history lesson. Let’s get into it -- and we’ll start with a new set of experimental charts.

Modern Equivalent Table (Gaming)

Equivalent Gaming Performance in 2024 | Alder Lake Revisit | GamersNexus | EXPERIMENTAL CHARTS

	12900K	12700K	12600K	12400	12100F
Stellaris	i5-14600K R5 7600	i5-13600K 5600X3D/5700X3D	R7 5800X R5 5600X	R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X
F1 24	i5-13600K R5 7600X Ultra 5 245K	Ultra 5 245K 5600X/5800X	R5 5600X	5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X
Dragon's Dogma 2	R5 5600X3D Ultra 7 265K	Ultra 5 245K i5-13600K R7 9700X	i5-13600K R7 9700X R9 7900X	R9 7900X R7 7700X	R5 5600X R7 3700X
Rainbow Six Siege	Ultra 5 245K [worse lows] R7 5800X	No Immediate Neighbor Closest: Ultra 5 245K, 12400	No Suitable Comparison: - No Modern Neighbor - No Immediate Neighbor	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X
Total War: Warhammer III	Ultra 7 265K R5 5600X3D R7 5800X	R7 5700X3D R5 5600X	R9 7900X	R9 7900	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 3600
Starfield	5800X3D i5-13600K R9 7950X R5 7600X3D	Ultra 5 245K R7 5700X3D R7 7700X/9700X	R9 7900X R7 5800X	R5 9600X R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 3600
Final Fantasy XIV	R9 7900 i5-13600K Ultra 7 265K	R9 7900 i5-13600K Ultra 7 265K	Ultra 5 245K	Ultra 5 245K	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X
Baldur's Gate 3	R9 9700X/9900X Ultra 7 265K R9 7900/X	Ultra 5 245K R7 7700X	R5 7600X i5-13600K R5 5600X	R5 7600X i5-13600K R5 5600X	DNF Issues running benchmark

We have a table we’re experimenting with for this. This table will list the closest equivalent component for each application tested. Sometimes the ranges don’t line-up well, so we chose the closest within reason, but deferred to older parts where necessary. We defined “modern” as anything from Ryzen 5000 or newer and anything from Intel 13 and newer, even though 5000 can be pretty old -- it opened up more comparisons.

Broadly speaking, we noticed that the 12900K is similar to a newer i5 in several games. This included Stellaris, F1 24, Starfield, Final Fantasy XIV, and the Ultra 5 in Rainbow Six (but with worse lows). The Ultra 7 265K (read our review) was also close in Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate 3. AMD’s CPUs are more varied, and include the 7600 (watch our review), 7600X (watch our review), 5800X, and some X3D parts, generally those are higher performers.

The 12700K was broadly similar to an Ultra 5 245K from Intel or a 5600X to 5800X from AMD, with some X3D presence. Most X3D parts perform much higher than these Alder Lake CPUs.

The 12600K was regularly near the 5800X and 13600K CPUs.

The 12400 regularly neighbored the 5600X and sometimes the 245K or 9600X. The 12100F had few modern neighbors, mostly aligning with a 3700X (watch our review) or 3600 (watch our review) for gaming performance.

Modern Equivalent Table (Production)

Equivalent Production Performance in 2024 | Alder Lake Revisit | GamersNexus | EXPERIMENTAL CHARTS

	12900K	12700K	12600K	12400	12100F
Blender	i7-13700K R9 7900	i5-13600K R7 7700X	R5 9600X R7 5800X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 3600 Closest: R7 2700	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 2600
Chromium Code Compile	i7-13700K R9 7900/X	i5-14600K Ultra 5 245K R7 9700X	R5 9600X	R5 5600X3D	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 2600
7-Zip Compression	i5-14600K R7 9800X3D	Ultra 5 245K R7 7700X R7 9700X	R5 7600X/9600X R7 5700X3D	R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 2600
7-Zip Decompression	Ultra 7 265K R7 9800X3D R7 7700X	R7 5800X Ultra 5 245K	R5 7600X3D R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 2600	No Suitable Comparison: - No Modern Neighbor - No Immediate Neighbor
Adobe Photoshop	R5 7600X3D i5-14600K i5-13600K R7 5800X3D	i5-13600K R7 5800X/X3D	R7 5800X R5 5600X3D	R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R7 3700X
Adobe Premiere	R7 9800X3D Ultra 5 245K	i5-13600K R7 9700X R7 7800X3D	R5 9600X R5 7600X	R5 5600X3D R5 5600X	No Modern Neighbor Closest: R5 2600

Here’s the same concept, but applied to production workloads.

Intel Alder Lake does better here for modern equivalents. The 12900K is regularly similar to a 13700K (watch our review) or 7900-class CPU. It isn’t distant from the 265K in Decompression, although dips in Premiere closer to a 245K (read our review).

The 12700K (watch our review) is similar to the 13600K in many of its tests, so after 3 years, it has dropped to subsequent series i5 performance levels. The 245K is regularly right alongside the 12700K. From AMD, the 9700X (read our review) and 7700X are regularly its modern equivalent. The 12600K (watch our review) is most similar to the 9600X or 7600X in many tests, with no nearby modern Intel equivalents. They are all much better than this. We might have to test a 13400 (read our review) or something to see this level.

The 12400 (watch our review) is regularly near the 5600X. In some tests, it is down at 3600 or 2600 (watch our review) levels. The 12100F has no modern neighbors and, in some instances, no suitable comparisons close by. The R5 2600 (watch our review) is regularly the closest comparison for the 12100F.

Intel 12th Generation Gaming Benchmarks

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Stellaris

We’ll start with Stellaris, the space game which we use to test for simulation time rather than framerate. This is still a great benchmark because the results don’t care about resolution or graphics: It is a highly CPU-bound game with real-world implications for time.

First up, our new entry with the best result is the 9800X3D with liquid nitrogen and at 6.2 GHz. Although you could have a friend or family member pour LN2 while you game, it’s not likely -- but we wanted to put it here to show just how insane the CPU is when pushed to the limits.

Snap back to reality, we have Alder Lake: The 12th Gen CPUs land at 36.7 seconds for the 12900K, 37.7 seconds for the 12700KF, 41.2 seconds for the 12600K, and 43.1 seconds for the 12400. Top-to-bottom, this creates a range of 6.4 seconds, or a reduction in simulation time from the 12400 to the 12900K of 15% -- meaning 15% less time to simulate. If you had bought the 12900K for $630 in 2021, then it’s given you about 3 years of performance and has aged into a modern i5 in this test, which really isn’t that bad. The 14600K is adjacent at 36.6 seconds. An in-socket upgrade to a 14900K (read our review) would get you about a 9.5% reduction in simulation time and is probably not worth it for most people. The 9800X3D (without liquid nitrogen) would yield a 30% reduction in simulation time.

The 12700K is slightly better than a 5700X3D, with the 12600K around 5800X (watch our review) and 5600X levels. The 12400 is significantly better than the 12100F at 47 seconds and just behind the 5600X.

Dragon’s Dogma 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up now. In this one, the chart leader is the 9800X3D at 129 FPS AVG, which is an incredible lead over the 7800X3D’s 111 FPS AVG.

The 12900K falls down to a cluster of Intel parts that cap-out around 100 FPS. The 265K is roughly equivalent to the 12900K in averages and lows. The 245K isn’t far behind. 

The 14900K boosts the ceiling to 110 FPS AVG, alongside the 13900K, 14700K, and 13700K that find a 10% higher ceiling. The 5700X3D has functionally identical performance to the 12900K. Anything on this list is a sidegrade for it other than a 9800X3D.

We feel the same about the 12700K: It wouldn’t be worth upgrading by this test alone.

The 12600K and 12400 show more age: Both are still great for framerate and completely playable, but at least a gap to the top is established. Moving to a 9800X3D would boost performance by 46% from the 12600K. An in-socket upgrade might be about 22% by moving to a 13700K. 

The 12100F is at 71 FPS AVG, which is also remarkably good for such a modern game. The lows are hurting a little more and sometimes get spiky, but overall, we’re impressed by how it has held on. Upgrading to a 13700K in-socket would be a huge upgrade from the 12100F. It would be economical, and might be worth considering.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail (1080p)

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is a 2024 entry for us.

The Alder Lake series does OK here from an absolute standpoint, but is far down the charts in a relative sense.

The 12900K and 12700K are between the Ultra 7 265K -- which did horribly in this benchmark -- and the 13600K. The Ultra 200 Series is known to be regressive in this game, with Intel also showing the same behavior. The sad thing is that you’d be going backwards if you didn’t pay attention to benchmarks and bought a 265K. It wouldn’t be a crazy thing to do, either: It’s 3 so-called “generations” newer, yet worse than a 12700K and 12900K, at least in this test. The 12600K wouldn’t even see a huge uplift to it either.

The 13700K and 14700K offer large improvements around 15-18% from Alder Lake, though you’d need a good price to be worth the purchase. The 14900K boosts to 310 FPS AVG, an uplift of 26% over the 12900K.

AMD’s 9800X3D sets the ceiling at 373 FPS AVG, with all the other X3D parts right alongside it. 

Starfield

Starfield is up next. The 12900K hits 124 FPS AVG in our test here, which aligns it with the 13600K and 14600K CPUs, slightly bested by the 5800X3D (watch our review). This goes to show how good the 5800X3D was at launch, especially given the price gap when both the 12900K and 5800X3D were still regularly available new.

The 9800X3D shows room for a 36% improvement in performance from the 12900K. The 285K with ultra-fast, expensive memory in Gear 2 improves by 23% on the 12900K, but the like-for-like comparison has it at 15% ahead.

The 12700K is similar to a 245K -- you’d be downgrading overall by moving to it, aside from efficiency. The 5700X3D (read our review) is also nearby. Upgrading the 12700K to a 14900K would get you about 13% more performance and probably isn’t worth it overall.

The 12600K stands to gain more notably if upgraded in-socket to a 13700K, where it’d gain 26%. The 12400 could be worth considering an in-socket jump to a 14600K (watch our review) or 13700K as well, if cheap enough.

The 12100F is somehow still chugging along, sandwiched between AMD’s 3000-series parts and outperforming the R5 3600 and R7 2700 (watch our review).

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 used to have the X3D series all in the 120s, but the 9800X3D broke that in a massive way and hit 160 FPS AVG in our particular test case. We validated this in our 9800X3D review and explained why it’s happening.

X3D dominates the entire top quarter of this chart, followed next by the memory-boosted 285K. The prior generation 14900K, 13900K, and 13700K are all within error of each other. Don’t be confused by their ordering: Their performance is identical and within run-to-run variance, which is due to encountering a memory limitation. We can see this from the 285K (read our review) stock results versus the DDR5-8600 results.

The 12900K ran at 96 FPS AVG, or equal to the 265K. The 265K would be an expensive downgrade when looking at the total picture. The 12900K is still doing well enough here that it probably doesn’t make sense to replace except maybe with a 9800X3D.

The 12700K is about tied with a 245K. Like the 12900K, there aren’t many worthy upgrades here. A 13700K, 13900K (watch our review), or 14900K would give about a 15% uplift in our testing.

The 12600K and 12400 are at about 13600K levels of performance. An in-socket upgrade to a 13700K in this chart would yield about 28% improvement from these CPUs. The 12100F had trouble running this test. We might be able to force it to work, but natively, the low performance was bad enough that we consider it disqualifying in our test.

F1 24 - 1080p

F1 24 is up next.

The game scales from 163 FPS AVG up to 464 FPS AVG in our testing. The 12900K starts Alder Lake off down in the range of the i5 CPUs, including the 13600K and 14600K. Inspecting the data, we found that the 12900K had a more variable average FPS than some other CPUs, which we think is due to its core arrangement and Windows 2H24: The range was 310.5 FPS to 316 FPS AVG run-to-run, and upon inspection, it is due to the frametime pacing where we sometimes get a higher throughput with worse pacing and sometimes the opposite.

Overall, it ends up around 13600K levels. We saw this last round as well, just with an older Windows version. The 14900K has a 23% advantage on the 12900K. The 9800X3D runs 49% ahead of the 12900K.

The 12700KF is between the 5800X and 5600X, with the 245K just ahead. Intel’s 12600K lands at 270 FPS AVG, meaning a 13700K upgrade would boost the average by about 34%.

The 12100F still does great here, all things considered, and is just ahead of the 3700X.

Production Benchmarks

On to production benchmarks. For these tests, we’re looking at applications like Blender, Chromium code compile, and more. Users of the i7 and i9 CPUs are more likely to care about the performance here. It’s also one of Intel’s strong points of the past generations.

Blender

Blender 3D rendering is up first for production.

The 12900K did well here. It’s at 11.7 minutes required to complete a single-frame render of the GN intro animation, which has it about tied with the 12C/24T AMD R9 7900 non-X CPU. The 13700K does well with its higher frequency and equal core count to the 12900K. The 14900K has large gains here from moving to a 32-thread configuration, reducing the time required by 27% to 8.5 minutes. That’s about the same we see from the newer 265K, with the 285K doing well in one of its few strong tests and reducing time to 7.1 minutes. That has it at about the 9950X levels of performance.

If you were upgrading for gaming, the 9800X3D is the only option that might universally make sense against the 12900K. But for production, unfortunately, the options wouldn’t necessarily move the needle on gaming performance in a meaningful way despite offering large gains in workstation applications. You’d have to choose.

The 12700KF has the same core count as the 13600K, so the two perform about the same. An upgrade to the 14900K in-socket would be a huge 39% reduction in render time required.

The 12600K is at about levels of the 9600X. The 7800X3D (watch our review) outperforms it, but is better in gaming than production as compared to the non-3D parts like the 7700X. The 9800X3D would at least improve on the 12600K somewhat while giving a big boost to gaming.

As for the 12400 and 12100F, they’re near the bottom. The 12100F struggles with core count, so the 2600 is a little faster. The 12400 is roughly tied with the 3600.

Chromium

In Chromium code compile, the 12900K required 119 minutes to complete the compile. This has it closer to the R9 7900 non-X (watch our review) than anything else. The 13700K improves with its higher frequency and equal core count, with the 14900K giving a compile time reduction of 26% less time. The 285K is also a big step up, though not significantly different from the 14900K.

Intel’s 12600K might see enough benefit from an in-socket upgrade to a 14900K or 14700K (read our review) that it’d be worth considering, especially for the gaming uplift, but only if you’re trying to save on cost by reusing a board and DDR5 RAM. 

The 12100F required 382 minutes, which is still about an hour more time than the R7 2700 and about tied with the R5 2600.

7-Zip Compression

7-Zip compression testing makes the 12900K feel a little older, outperforming the 14600K by just 4.3% (and similar for the 9800X3D). In the very least, upgrading to a 9800X3D for gaming would at least net equal performance in this type of task.

The 14900K offers a 38% increase in MIPS over the 12900K, maybe making it worth considering.

A new build with a 9950X yields about a 46% uplift in this benchmark.

The 12700K is down near the 7700X (watch our review) and 9700X, with the 14700K 48% higher in MIPS.

If you have a 12600K and wanted to stay on Alder Lake, moving to the 12900K improves performance by 48% here, which is pretty massive. 

The 12400 is more similar to a 5600X or 3600, so anything would be an upgrade. The 12100F is at the bottom, falling behind the R5 2600 in a predictable way with its thread deficiency in this test.

7-Zip Decompression

7-Zip decompression shows a lot of scaling with cores, as indicated by the 9950X (read our review) and 7950X. The 12900K still does OK here and bests the 9800X3D on a technicality. The 265K offers an uplift that wouldn’t be worth buying into, with the 285K pushing 30% higher in MIPS to 193K. The 7900X (watch our review) and 13900K offer more meaningful uplifts though, with the 13900K and 14900K benefiting from higher thread count and opening opportunities for upgrades.

The 12700KF is at 245K levels of performance and about tied with a 5800X. The 12600K would see multiples of uplift with some of the newer options at the top of this chart, again including the 14900K and 13900K. The 12100F isn’t comparable to anything here, with the 12400 similar to an R5 2600.

Adobe Premiere

Adobe testing is next with the Puget Suite.

Back with the Alder Lake launch, we stuck with Intel for our Premiere editing systems since it was the best opportunity at that time.

Today, the part still does pretty well in Premiere. Actually, we still use its direct descendants in our main editing machines, including 13700Ks and various i9s. The 12900K scored 9948 points in aggregate, which has it between the 9800X3D and 7900X. The 14900K wouldn’t boost it much, only 11% here. The 285K scores a rare victory in this one, but again wouldn’t be a huge move if you’re already on a 12900K. It might make more sense for a new build.

The 12700KF could be kept relevant a little longer with a bump to a 14700K and still be a top scorer on the chart with modern memory. The same goes for the 12600K and 12400.

The 12100F at least outdoes the 2600, but that’s it.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is last.

This one is a bloodbath compared to many years ago, with Adobe updates and AMD architecture changes benefiting AMD.

The 12900K is in the lower half of the chart and surrounded by i5 CPUs, with the 12600K near AMD’s 5800X. The 12100F at least does comparatively better here and outranks the R5 3600.

Overall, almost anything is an upgrade over Alder Lake in this test.

Conclusion

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Wrapping things up, the 12th Gen CPUs are still pretty good. 

People commonly ask us when they should buy or wait. If you’re on a 12th Gen CPU, we’ll break it down like this: Ask yourself if you’re happy with your PC right now. If you’re not actively annoyed by your computer’s performance, then you can just keep using it. If, however, the performance is bad or you just want to build a PC because it’s fun, then there are options here. 

One of the options is for an in-socket upgrade, to which there are caveats, which we’ll discuss below. Another option is to build a new system.  

For the in-socket option, the 13th and 14th series would be potential drop-in upgrades. The lower down the stack 12th Gen CPU you have, like the 12400F (read our review) or 12600K, the more meaningful it would be to do this. 

For this to work, you need to make sure your motherboard with a 12th Gen CPU has the newer CPUs on its compatibility list. You should be able to find this on the manufacturer’s website. You would also need to update the BIOS. If you’re upgrading from something like a 12100F to a 13900K, you’d want to make sure that your board has a good enough VRM to handle the additional heat and power. Likewise, it’s ideally an unlocked board for more feature support.

We tested on DDR5 here with like-for-like memory between the platforms. You could have used DDR4 with 12th Gen also. DDR4 could be a limiting factor, so if you have to upgrade your RAM and motherboard, you may as well go with a fully new build from AMD instead (if building a gaming PC), like a 9800X3D or similar.

And finally, used CPUs might be a bit of a landmine situation, unfortunately. Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen woes are detailed in other stories we’ve published, but one potential problem is that used CPUs could have instability issues. You’ll want to be careful when buying used. This is unfortunate, because CPUs have historically been pretty bullet-proof -- especially Intel’s -- and have been a great used option to save a quick $100 on an in-socket upgrade.

The price of new 13th and 14th series have dropped in price, which makes something like a 13700K not a bad option, especially if you’re on a lower tier 12th series part. 

Overall, objectively speaking, Intel’s 12th CPUs (for the most part) are still great gaming parts. They’re not at the top of the charts anymore, but that’s OK.

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Intel Unbends Its CPUs: 285K RL-ILM vs. Standard ILM Laser, Pressure, & Thermal Benchmarksjimmy_thang December 26, 2024

We take an in-depth look into Intel’s new Reduced Load ILM by putting it under a laser scanner, specialized pressure scanning, and more

The Highlights

• Intel’s new Reduced Load ILM (RL-ILM) helps unbend its CPUs
• Despite offering improvements, the new and better ILM is optional
• The RL-ILM is an improvement in both the curvature of the IHS and substrate and of the temperature in our testing

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Intel is finally trying to unbend its CPUs, despite having to be on a bender to buy a $630 285K right now. Today, we’re using our laser scanner to look at the deflection in the CPU heat spreader from the different loading mechanisms, including these scans of the 285K (read our review) and 245K with different coolers installed. Today’s testing also includes specialized pressure scanning to produce pseudocolor images of pressure distribution across the IHS surface, very brief thermal testing to look at the differences with Noctua’s LBC (Low Base Convexity) flat coldplate, and we’ll look at the mechanical aspects.

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 4, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Host

Mike Gaglione

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

3D animation, Camera

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Unfortunately, Intel’s new and better ILM is optional. It didn’t force motherboard manufacturers to use it, so they can still cut corners if they want to save a few pennies. The new ILM is called the RL-ILM, or Reduced Load ILM, with the old one being referred to as the “Standard” ILM (indicating an assumption of it being the default). Our Z890 Hero ships with the RL-ILM, as do most high-end boards, so we used it as a test platform to swap to other official LGA-1851 ILMs for comparison.

Let’s get into it.

Differences

We’ll get some basic education in and go over the differences:

CPU sockets are one part mechanical and one part electrical. Intel uses what is called an Independent Loading Mechanism for its socket. Some people include the ILM when referring to the socket. On a technicality, the literal socket is the Land Grid Array with the carrier that actually holds the CPU. The loading mechanism is the mechanical part of the socket.

Intel is shipping 2 types of ILM, RL-ILM and Standard, and it is using at least 3 different suppliers that we’re aware of to manufacture these. Our Z890 Hero came with an RL-ILM by Lotes, which is a long-time supplier of ILMs. We also have the same-brand ILM of the Standard variant, plus the two other suppliers you’ll find on boards.

RL-ILM vs. Standard ILM

Here’s a CAD render of the socket. The standard ILM has an angle that increases the force application along the edges of the CPU. That’s the real difference here. This is what causes the depression we’ve seen in previous 3D laser scans we performed. These scans are from our past content: You can see how the ILM causes significant bending and forms a central concavity with the heat spreader, leading flatter cooler coldplates to be worse on Intel despite being better on AMD. You can learn more about that in our previous coverage here and here. 

Back to the CAD model, the RL-ILM is basically just flat. This is the biggest change, as the force should be reduced. This is also why Intel requires a higher force heatsink to be installed in order to ensure contact.

The RL-ILM also has one other difference: There’s an additional adhesive spacer on the underside, which can be thought of as similar to the washer mod that Noctua now ships with its NH-D15 G2 coolers as an option. The additional spacer goes underneath the existing black spacer, meaning that the ILM "leg" component probably was taken from existing Standard ILM stock, then retrofitted with effectively a sticker.

3D Animation

In our original Thermal Grizzly contact frame benchmark, we showed how the ILM clamp appeared to apply very slightly higher pressure to one side of the socket. This was exaggerated by the fact that the ILM has some play in it, where it can shift side-to-side and be repositioned and we saw that still happens on the RL-ILM. 

Here’s our 3D render of the standard ILM: With the CPU dropped into the socket, the standard ILM uses a hook that’s attached to the lever to centrally press down on the ILM lid that clamps directly to the CPU IHS. With the lever fully down and secured, the ILM is now secured at 3 points: 2 on the bottom of the ILM and 1 at the top. All of this is the same on the new RL-ILM. 

As for the CPU, the ILM has two wings that press down on the IHS at the borders, and with that curvature we showed in the CAD model, the force application at these points is high enough that a highly precise gauge can show how light is able to shine through despite the CPU being relatively flat when unclamped and looking flat to the eye.

We’ll refer you to our Thermal Grizzly Contact Frame benchmark from 2022 to learn more about this older style of ILM.

For the new version, clamping the CPU in the socket functions mechanically identically for the end user, with the lever pulling down to hook under a securing latch and clamp the ILM at 3 points, with 2 main contact points at the wings of the IHS. However, the lack of a bend in the ILM reduces the load. Intel still has to keep the force high enough that the CPU’s pads make contact with the socket pins, but has to be careful that it’s the right amount.

Too much or too little force can cause boot issues and high clock memory stability.

And that’s really it for these ILMs.

Pressure Scans

Noctua just got done spending literal years developing its new NH-D15 G2 and shipped it with 3 different coldplates, which makes it a unique candidate for pressure testing. 

For pressure testing, we take the different ILMs and apply a special pressure paper between the CPU and the coldplate. We then take that and scan it in with a specialized pressure scanner to create pseudocolor images of the pressure distribution.

Pressure Scan Noctua Results - HBC on RL-ILM vs. Standard

Here are the results for the two ILM types with the HBC cooler.

The new Reduced Load ILM with the high base convexity Noctua coldplate yielded low pressure at the outer edges, but especially toward the top of the board near the VRM and EPS12V cables. The pressure centrally remained high; however, because the CPU should be flatter with this ILM, the Noctua cooler ends up with less evenly distributed pressure because it’s designed for a different scenario.

The standard ILM with HBC cooler scans reinforce this: The HBC cooler ends up with more evenly distributed pressure at the top and bottom edges of the CPU IHS.

Pressure Scan Noctua Results - HBC, LBC, Standard

And here’s only the RL-ILM with the 3 Noctua cooler cold plates.

The RL-ILM pressure distribution was the most evenly distributed with the standard and LBC solutions. The two are mostly indistinguishable for distribution, although the precise pressure centrally will influence the results in thermal testing.

The LBC cooler had slight gaps at the left and right edges, but consistently square distribution at the top and bottom corners, with good pressure across the entire center. The standard cooler had less consistent pressure at the top and bottom edges and similar gaps to LBC at the edges. Ultimately though, these two basically look the same for contact.

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Laser Scan: Noctua Coldplates

Our Noctua NH-D15 G2 review went into depth with laser scans of the cooler’s coldplates, and that hasn’t changed. We’re showing the LBC, Standard, and HBC scans again briefly here just to help recap the impact because when we’re looking at pressure and how it is affected by the ILM, the cold plate is a part of that equation. 

And now we’ll scan the new Intel CPUs to see how their shape matches the pressure scans we saw earlier. 

285K & 245K Unsocketed Laser Scan

Here’s a look at the plain Intel 285K when it’s just flat in the laser scanner. The CPU isn’t in a socket at all here, so this is as simple as it gets. Even in our 2D screenshots of the 3D scan, we can see the letters -- the CPU IHS is so flat that the very slight indentation for the text is visible.

The IHS itself has a few higher points, one just off-center, one along the right edge when oriented in a legible orientation, and one just off the left edge of the CPU.

Magnifying it 100x, that coloration grows to form just a few high points. Overall, it’s flat, but at high magnification, some small deviations appear. One thing that is clear though is that there is no substrate curvature, which makes sense since it hasn’t been socketed.

Let’s create a grid with the 285K and add the 245K to it. The 245K (read our review) follows a similar pattern: Centrally, it’s a little higher, then just off-center right it’s also slightly higher at 1x. Adding 100x to the grid, there’s a similar pattern as with the 285K.

Finally, we added our unsocketed 12900KS from the golden sample coldplate story. It’s still flat when unsocketed, but the difference in IHS design is also slightly showing through.

Socketed Testing

And now, we’re going to throw this Z890 Hero with the new ILM into the scanner and socket the CPUs in it. We obtained this package of ILMs to test. The ASUS board uses the Lotes RL-ILM, so we’ll start with that one.

Standard vs. Low Pressure Socket - 3D

Here’s a one-to-one 3D visualization in Blender taking STL files from our laser scanner, showing the 285K with the standard ILM first. As usual, 1x magnification doesn’t show much, but bringing that to 100x quickly shows a deep concavity centrally, just like we saw with LGA 1700 CPUs.

Switching over to the new reduced load socket, we can see that the 1x to 100x magnification shows less of a pronounced curvature of the IHS itself. It’s still curved, but much less, with the CPU maintaining a more consistent height instead.

Socket Comparison - Grid (285K)

Here’s a grid comparison of the different ILMs on the same motherboard, tested with the same CPU -- starting with the 285K.

You can see that the Standard ILM at 100x magnification shows a huge deflection centrally, as we’ve seen before, with higher pressure on the far ends of the mechanism. While we can sort of see the slight ridgeline down the middle of the CPU, the bigger issue is how deeply it indents.

The reduced load socket is significantly flatter, with less of a central deflection. The ridgeline in the CPU IHS becomes more pronounced in the graphic because it is more consistently the highest thing in the image. Remember that this is at 100x magnification, so the differences are exaggerated intentionally.

Socket Comparison - Grid (245K)

Unveiling the 245K results in the grid, we see the same patterns: The standard ILM deeply indents the CPU centrally, deflecting and deforming it in a way that coldplates with matching convexity will cool it the best. The reduced load socket is flatter and more consistent, though is still slightly deflected centrally.

Laser Scan: ASUS Cooler

We need a laser scan of the cooler coldplate before moving to the pressure maps, as the cooler and IHS alike contribute to the pressure distribution. 

This laser scan shows the coldplate of the ASUS Ryujin liquid cooler, which is what Intel sent with its CPUs to reviewers. Other coolers would fit, but we wanted to test what Intel officially endorsed.

At a 1x scale, the ASUS Ryujin coldplate looks relatively flat, but still shows a protrusion dead-center, gradually reducing height towards the outer edges. When we did our in-depth testing on Intel performance with varying custom-made coldplates from Scythe, we found that this pattern often did well for Intel.

Scaling it 100x, we get this almost comical tower protruding from the coldplate. This helps us see the steep slope as ASUS applies massive pressure dead-center with its coldplate design. This is sort of a hamfisted approach and version of what Noctua did more precisely with the D15 G2 for LGA 1700, except Noctua had more nuance in the exact shape of the convexity, which will better align with the concavity in LGA 1700 CPU heat spreaders previously. It’s similar to what we saw in the $60 Thermalright liquid cooler, which managed to brute force its way in performance thanks to similar protrusions.

Pressure Testing Results

Time to look at some pressure scans of the ASUS cooler with the new Intel ILMs.

These images show a new pressure scan of our 14900KF with the ASUS Ryujin cooler and the old (or “standard”) ILM. In this scan, you can see the 14900KF has narrowing pressure on the left and right sides, with most of its pressure centered. That’s where it should be, and most of that is thanks to the comically protruding ASUS coldplate, but fuller coverage is ideal. The older IHS also is a little bit different shape than the new one. The second column represents the pre-installed reduced load ILM using the 285K. Looking at the third column, adding the standard ILM with the 285K, doesn’t look too different. The pressure profile appears to be distributed taller and narrower. There’s still some of that slimming effect going on when we get to the left and right sides but not nearly as pronounced as with the last gen IHS design and ILM. 

Ultimately, what we see is that ASUS’ older brute force approach gets a better pressure distribution on the prior LGA 1700 socket than on the new ARL 285K socket, which is thanks to the massive central protrusion. This is the approach Thermalright took with its $50-$60 liquid coolers previously as well. It’s relatively hamfisted, but works, whereas the more carefully shaped approach of air coolers like the D15 G2 and the Scythe FUMA 3 are technically a better pressure match; now, that said, a 360mm liquid cooler is still “better” (with regard to capability) overall, and it will cool better, but the Ryujin could improve with more purposeful coldplate shaping.

Thermal Test Setup

Thermal testing is up now. Full transparency that we’re keeping this really simple this time, mostly because it doesn’t take much testing to verify if there’s a difference at all.

We’re only running the comparison thermals with one cooler this time. The ASUS cooler is so heavily deflected that we’re not sure the comparison would be that useful, so instead, we approached it with what should be a worst case scenario: The Noctua NH-D15 G2 LBC, or low base convexity, which is the flattest of Noctua’s options. In theory, this should be the worst on the more deflected standard ILM+IHS combination and the best on the flatter IHS from the RL-ILM.

Other coolers could have more or less impact. Coolers with higher force application centrally and with more convexity would continue to compensate for design problems of the standard ILM, but we want to just run a quick evaluation on one of the uncompensated scenarios.

We are also not testing anything below the minimum spec Intel declares for the socket, which is a 35 lb. force from the cooler. Anything high-end that’d be paired with the current CPUs will meet or exceed this requirement anyway.

Thermal Results

Here are the results from a simple A/B test. For this testing, we did two full mounts and at least 3 passes to average the numbers. This allowed us to check for variance mount-to-mount. All our other CPU cooler standards and methodologies apply, like manually spreading paste, controlling the fan speeds, and fixing the voltages and frequency. We disabled all power and thermal limits and set a fixed voltage with fixed frequencies. We have a known power draw down the EPS12V and 24-pin ATX12V through the 4 phases that it has (without PCIe slot power). That allows us to get these numbers.

The result was 61.8 degrees delta T over ambient for average P-core temperature with the standard ILM and 59.6 dT with the RL-ILM, or the improved one, meaning about a 2.2-degree reduction when accounting for  ambient. Without the deltas, we were running the 285K in the 80s to low 90s because we disabled all TVB 70-degree throttle controls. Running the CPU hotter allows us to see more of a gap between the results. A CPU consuming less power with a stronger cooler would likely not show as big a gap.

Checking briefly with Der8auer as a peer review, we learned our results are roughly in-line with his own. The differences are aligned with cooler and heat load differences.

We observed a slightly lower core-to-core delta with the new ILM, but it was within error. The AVG all-core temperatures were not significantly different from the P-core temperatures in this one due to the proximity of the P-cores to E-cores in this architecture (combined with our adjustments in BIOS). 

So, as short as possible, the RL-ILM is about 2.2 degrees better at this heat load with this cooler.

Tutorial to Remove and install the ILM

Before we move to the conclusion, in case you buy a motherboard with a standard ILM and want to move from the high pressure standard one to the low-pressure RL-ILM, we’ll walk you through how to do that. 

If you are going to swap the socket, we recommend sticking with the same brand for the replacement if possible. In our case, we used Lotes. 

To begin, we recommend starting with the CPU installed to protect the pins underneath to mitigate the risk of dropping, say, a loose screw down into the socket. 

From there, unscrew the 4 screws. We used a regular T20 Torx screwdriver. 

Removing the screws frees the top and bottom pieces of the socket. It also frees the backplate. When you’re installing the backplate, it’s important to get the orientation right and to ensure that the plastic sticker side is touching the bottom of the motherboard and not the exposed metal side. The backplate also features a notch that aligns with the triangle that’s on the corner of the CPU.   

We found that it’s easier to install the lever arm piece first with its 2 screws. Once that’s in place, it’s time to secure the other side with its 2 screws. You don’t need a lot of torque for the screws. We recommend that you tighten them in a star pattern to evenly distribute pressure.  

Conclusion

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We regularly see people online saying that some cooler is 3 degrees lower than some other cooler, so just a reminder here on how all of this works: That 2.2 degrees is specifically at the power load we tested and with the cooler we used, under the conditions we employed. It will be higher or lower based on how these parameters change.

As an example, we did one round of tests with all the Intel throttle controls still enabled and saw less than 1-degree of difference -- but that’s because it was just throttling itself to regulate the temperature.

The new RL-ILM is definitely an objective improvement in both the curvature of the IHS and substrate and of the temperature in our brief testing. The pressure distribution depends on the cooler more than anything and it isn’t always clearly better, but the thermal result tells us that the net result is positive.

Frustratingly, this is optional. Intel is not at a stage where it should be making clear, simple, easy improvements “optional” for motherboard vendors. 

Although we don’t want Intel or AMD to force certain lock-downs, like taking away overclocking features, we do think both companies should enforce a default or baseline configuration that is in the best interests of the consumer, with the option for the consumer to tweak as their motherboard allows once exiting default settings.

In this situation, we do think Intel should just bite the bullet and force the better solution. It may be a situation where board partners had already purchased millions of these older mechanisms. Regardless, Intel has at least improved its mechanism. It is technically slightly more expensive than the original ILM, but since we’re talking pennies, we’d like to see this forced in the next generation as the standard ILM since it is just better. Intel needs to stop taking a soft-handed approach to its partners and taking the small victories when it can get them.

This doesn’t kill the contact frame market, though: That’ll still provide uplift, as the RL-ILM remains a mid-step improvement without going full flat like the prior contact frames we’ve tested.

That’s it for this one. We probably won’t do a ton of Arrow Lake follow-up testing since it doesn’t make any sense to buy right now, but we may explore a few other features.

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Best CPU Coolers We've Tested (2024): Thermals, Noise Levels, & Valuejimmy_thang December 17, 2024

Our round-up includes the best CPU coolers for value, budget, noise-normalized thermals in both air and liquid categories, best mechanical design, and best overall.

The Highlights

• Best Overall CPU Cooler of 2024: ID-Cooling A720
• Best Value CPU Cooler: Thermalright Frozen Prism
• Best Budget CPU Cooler: ID-Cooling SE-214-XT
• Best Mechanical Design CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 G2

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today, we’re rounding-up some of the best CPU coolers that we’ve tested in recent years, including air and liquid coolers.

This is a continuation of our favorite series each year, where we get to have some fun comparing only the best-of-the-best products we looked at and avoid the usual disappointments. But there was some huge news this year: DeepCool got banned and is now gone from the US market. With that, a power vacuum has formed among cooler manufacturers, and Thermalright’s former nemesis has been replaced with Arctic and ID Cooling aggressively trying to fill it. We can’t say that was on our bingo card.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 15, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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These tests will include results from our new 250W and 200W Intel heat loads in addition to our 200W and 123W AMD heat loads. The categories this year are for Best Overall CPU Cooler, Best Budget CPU Cooler, Best Value CPU Cooler, Best Noise-Normalized Thermals, and Best Mechanical Design. Let’s get started.

Setting Expectations

These Best Of articles are intended to get newcomers up to speed quickly, so we won’t go into the same crazy depth we normally do for the standalone reviews. Each of the coolers that has a review will be linked in the description below so that you can find the full details if you want them, including all the 3D laser scanning, pressure maps, and downsides. This article will be more of a flyover.

We’re testing both air and liquid coolers for this one. We’ve added a lot of coolers to the charts that aren’t in our prior reviews, specifically tested for this round-up, so there’s new data mixed with old in here.

Additionally, keep in mind that our noise testing methodology changes between charts. For the AMD platform, we use our old room-scale noise testing.

For our Intel platform we just added, we’re testing in our hemi-anechoic chamber with a lower threshold of 25dBA normalization in a noise floor around 14 dBA.

As always, for cooler round-ups, we can only discuss coolers we’ve directly had hands-on time with. There are hundreds of coolers out there. We have a pretty good cross-section of the big options, but if you don’t see exactly what you’re looking for, we’d encourage you to check other content and expand your research.

You can find the full charts on our CPU coolers Mega Charts page. As a reminder, gamersnexus.net is a free website that is totally free from third-party ads and funded by the audience. We just got done running another 18 cooler tests on a 250W and 200W Intel platform with noise-normalized results in our hemi-anechoic chamber.

That’ll set us up. If you want to check out our Best CPUs and Best Cases round-ups, those are already live. All the review links and product links are in the description. Let’s get into it.

Overview: Best CPU Coolers of 2024

Category	CPU Cooler	Review
Best Overall CPU Cooler 2024	ID Cooling A720 on Amazon
Best Value CPU Cooler	Thermalright Frozen Prism on Amazon on Newegg	Thermalright Strikes Again: $56.90 360mm Liquid Cooler | Frozen Prism Review
Best Budget CPU Cooler	ID-Cooling SE-214-XT on Amazon
Best Thermals (Noise-Normalized) CPU Cooler	Liquid Freezer III on Amazon on Newegg Noctua NH-D15 G2 on Amazon on Newegg	The New Best: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 & 280 CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks Noctua NH-D15 G2 Review & Benchmarks, HBC & LBC Comparison, & Best CPU Coolers
Best Mechanical Design CPU Cooler	Noctua NH-D15 G2 on Amazon on Newegg	Noctua NH-D15 G2 Review & Benchmarks, HBC & LBC Comparison, & Best CPU Coolers

Best Overall CPU Cooler: ID Cooling A720

Amazon

Runner-Up: Arctic Freezer 36

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

Up first, our category for Best Overall CPU cooler this year. This category requires the pricing to be competitive, as it considers the value, the build quality and assembly features, ease-of-installation features, the thermal and acoustic performance, and everything else. Last year, we gave this to the Peerless Assassin 120, which is definitely a GOAT and remains one. This year, we’re giving it to two Thermalright competitors, depending on CPU: Overall, the ID-Cooling A720 gets the award this year. For our Intel bench specifically, we’re giving a tied rank award to the Arctic Freezer 36. 

Let’s start with the Intel results and the Freezer 36, since that one is isolated as a winner to just this bench.

The most heavily weighted element in favor of the Freezer 36 (read our review) is its price. Arctic said it’d increase the price within just months of launch, but seemingly never did. Even today, the Black model that we tested is about $28 -- an incredible value considering its performance, at least on our Intel bench, and fiercely competitive with the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 that won our award last year.

Our new Intel 250W noise-normalized charts also include the Peerless Assassin 140, which was eliminated because we discovered quality control issues and variance between our two units that resulted in a 2-degree spread of results, which is actually huge. Unfortunately, one of the Assassin 140 units we have just doesn’t have a good pressure scan or laser scan, while the other is fine. We were able to prove the source of the difference was a combination of the coldplate and mounting hardware.

You can see the two entries for the PA140 here. It’s not because the white model is better, but because the other unit has contact issues.

Anyway, that eliminates the new PA140 even if only the best entry were here. Of the remaining coolers, the Freezer 36 is the best performer after Noctua’s D15 G2 HBC. This is impressive with the Freezer 36’s $28 price. The G2, on the other hand, is $150. Some of this comes from Arctic’s mandate of a contact frame for the Intel version of its Freezer 36, but considering that’s all included in the price, this is a strong positioning. 

One other note here: The D15 2023 model we have here performs a little better than our original D15 from a decade ago, which is a result of minor tweaks or refinement in manufacturing processes along the way. We talked about this in the G2 review. If you’re on an older D15 from around when it launched, it’s likely it is marginally different in performance today.

On to the A720: In our Mega Charts for 200W testing previously, the Freezer 36 fell behind compared to its Intel results with the frame. This reveals our choice that’s tied for the category: The A720, which was also among the top two performers for Intel and is the best performer behind the D15 G2 (read our review) in this 200W, AMD noise-normalized test.

The combined chart-topping performance in both our AMD and Intel test benches is what leads the A720 to the Best Overall rank, with its relatively high build quality and moderate price securing the position. 

At $55, with occasional drops to $50, it’s competitive with the best (like the $150 G2) and manages a 55.2 degree over ambient result on our 200W AMD bench. This improves on the GOATed Peerless Assassin by 1-degree, which does have a little bit of an advantage in price. 

The Intel result improved on the Peerless Assassin 120 (read our review) by 1.6 degrees.

We recently tested the Phantom Spirit as well, but it didn’t outperform our Peerless Assassin 120. The Phantom Spirit EVO has a slightly smaller tower than the Assassin and also has a disadvantage with noisier fans, found in our chamber testing. The Spirit’s fan RPM is higher than the Assassin, but that doesn’t matter when normalizing for noise.

Overall, for the A720, we think it has surprisingly good build quality. The fans are well-fitted to the cooler, with the central fan sinking to benefit VRM cooling as well. We like the simplicity of the black model that we have. The mounting solution is overall straight-forward and the bulked-up 7-heatpipe design helps with coverage across the IHS. The cap plates are a nice touch without overdoing the branding. The central fan also levels-out nicely with the top plates and each fan has rubber bumpers on the corners to reduce vibration, which benefitted it in noise normalizing. Its biggest downside is size, where the 163mm height makes it about 6mm taller than a Peerless Assassin 120. This could limit some cases.

We think ID Cooling and Thermalright both are worth seriously paying attention to in 2025, especially with DeepCool’s disappearance from the US and the Freezer 36 is also worth considering if you happen to go Intel.

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Best Value CPU Cooler: Thermalright Frozen Prism

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

Our Best Value award this year goes to the Thermalright Frozen Prism. Value is judged by a combination of performance for the price, not just pure price. We have a Best Budget category as well for what is simply one of the best, cheap coolers.

Thermalright’s Frozen Prism is an enigma: It’s $52.71 at the time of this writing. This is somehow even cheaper than when we reviewed it. It’s cheap enough that we remain skeptical of whether it may have some sort of defect down the line. In some ways, it seems too good to be true. Concerns we have might involve gunk build-up, but we have no evidence of any such issues at this time. What we do have evidence of is impressive performance: The Frozen Prism (read our review) was a competitive liquid cooler in our testing, brute-forcing much of its performance with a hugely protruding copper coldplate, almost comically so. Our laser scans made this protrusion even more clear, with our pressure maps showing how the cooler leverages the design to brute-force high pressure dead-center, which is where the silicon often sits. 

Even on AMD, which has less-centered silicon than Intel’s prior monolithic CPUs, the pressure spreads wide enough that it’ll catch everything.

In our 200W heat load thermal benchmarks from the review, the Frozen Prism 360 ran at 49.7 degrees Celsius over ambient when noise-normalized, whereas the best liquid cooler we’d tested at the time, the Liquid Freezer III, ran at 46.7 degrees Celsius over ambient. That’s a big difference. At the same time, achieving such close performance at under $60 was previously unheard of.

In our prior test bench configuration for Intel, using a 250W heat load on the 12900KS, the Thermalright Frozen Prism was a chart-topper when at 100% fan speeds. If you look at the 53.2dBA noise levels though, it was incredibly inefficient compared to the Liquid Freezer III 360, which ran at 39.8dBA. This is over a 2x increase in perceived noise to the human ear for the Frozen Prism, yet it drops only a couple degrees. That’s an inefficient trade-off, and although fan speed could be lowered to compensate for noise, it’s clear the cooler isn’t some mastery of thermal and acoustic engineering.

What the Frozen Prism actually is, though, is a mastery of cost engineering. 

The Frozen Prism doesn’t have any real quality-of-life features to speak of or anything abnormal. It delivers what it promises, which is cheap cooling. Our only criticism of the physical construction, beyond some cheaper plastic-y feel of some parts, was the stiffer tubing. This can be worked around.

Thermalright has become known for flooding the market with countless options, to the point where it’s overwhelming even for its own staff to remember them all at tradeshows. The company is saturating listings and driving prices down, which is ultra-competitive and in some ways good for consumers. It’s also pretty cutthroat, and is why we now have name-brand coolers also dropping in price. Following-up its success with the Peerless Assassin 120 in years past, Thermalright is looking for a repeat in liquid. We’ll see how the Prism ages, but so far, it’s competitive, especially in thermals. That’s why the Thermalright Frozen Prism 360 gets our best value award.

Best Budget CPU Cooler: ID-Cooling SE-214-XT

Amazon

The next award is in the same vein, but simpler: Our Best Budget award goes to the ID-Cooling SE-214-XT ARGB and it’s challenging the GOAT in Thermalright. ID-Cooling is vying for Thermalright’s strategy. Last year, we praised it for its overall value -- though it has been shifted into the pure budget category with the Frozen Prism’s addition to our charts.

The SE-214-XT ARGB has dropped in price and is now somehow $15.19 at the time of writing. We normally wouldn’t cite the pennies, but when 19 cents is over 1% of the total price, it suddenly becomes relevant. The SE-214XT ARGB is a simple, 4-heatpipe cooler that revives the approach of the old Hyper 212. It’s dirt cheap, its quality is flimsy, its plastics feel like they’re from McDonald’s toys, its coldplate is spartan, and yet somehow, the thing can handle moderate heat loads. It won’t handle a 250W CPU in our test suite with any level of satisfaction, but it’s good enough for cheaper and lower power CPUs with users on more extreme budgets. This would also be a good consideration if you’re buying a used CPU to save money and need something that ticks the “good enough” box.

In our 123W heat load on AM4 last round, the ID Cooling SE-214-XT ARGB held 58 degrees delta T over ambient when at 37.9 dBA, which had it more noise efficient for the result than the lower-ranked Hyper 212 RGB cooler. It was bordering on Noctua’s aged NH-U12S (watch our review). The Thermalright Assassin Spirit (watch our review) ran at the same noise levels and a little more than 1 degree cooler and is likewise a cheap cooler, but at $16.79, somehow, and this is really weird to say, it’s almost 11% more expensive. What a bizarre world of coolers we’re in.

In our 14900KF 200W heat load and with 100% fan speeds, tested instead in our hemi-anechoic chamber that purchases from the store help fund, we landed at 60.6 degrees Celsius delta T. That had the SE-214-XT ARGB as the worst performer on the chart, but still somehow capable of holding a stable operating temperature. In other words, it’s fine. The next lowest performer is the Scythe FUMA 3 (watch our review) with its combination of two fans, a massive 9 degree improvement.

Our 25dBA noise-normalized testing still has it at the bottom of the charts for this heat load, but even at this slightly reduced speed, it’s still a capable performer.

We wouldn’t call the SE-214-XT “good,” but we do think it’s one of the best in class at its seemingly impossibly cheap price, considering it also has to sit in freight to ship to wherever it’s sold. If you need a cooler to just get a system going, this is a good value. ID Cooling seems poised to challenge Thermalright in the future.

Best Thermals (Noise-Normalized) CPU Cooler: Liquid Freezer III, D15 G2

Liquid Freezer III original review | Newegg | Amazon

D15 G2 original review | Newegg | Amazon

Runner-Up: ID-Cooling Frozn A720

Amazon

This is for the Best Noise-Normalized Thermals, and because we have both liquid and air coolers in the charts for this round-up, we’re assigning the award to one liquid cooler and one air cooler.

The Arctic Liquid Freezer III firmly receives the Best Noise-Normalized thermals award both overall and for liquid, but air can’t be expected to compete at the same level of liquid and large radiators (especially when dropping fan RPM). For air coolers, the award goes to the NH-D15 G2 HBC for Intel (or LBC for AMD), with a runner-up award for ID-Cooling’s Frozn A720. We’ve listed the latter because it’s $100 cheaper than the NH-D15 G2.

This is a thermal category, so we’ll focus on charts.

Starting with the Liquid Freezer III (read our review): Arctic’s revision of its Liquid Freezer II tried a number of new things, like shipping a mandatory contact frame with its Intel variation. This complicates matters and isn’t always for the best. 

We found that Arctic’s contact frame was worse than other options on the market, but its cooler design was such that other options couldn’t be used instead. It was still better than Intel’s ILM, though.

For thermals, the Liquid Freezer III is just as impressive as its predecessor, and its price is similarly competitive. In 200W testing on AMD with our older noise-normalized approach, the Liquid Freezer III was the clear chart topper when we limited the pump speed to 70% (which helped reduce noise and allowed higher fan RPM instead). Running the pump at 100% and sacrificing some of that noise budget for it, it was still tied for second place, behind only itself and matched with a cooler that’s now banned in the US. The next closest non-Arctic option is the Trinity Performance from Lian Li, which is specifically performance-focused in its design. 

In our Intel 250W heat load thermals on a 14900KF (read our review), also noise-normalized, the Liquid Freezer III with its mandatory frame climbs to the top of the chart. It’s ahead of the Frozen Prism by enough to not be margin of error or test variance. It’s also ahead of the Light Loop 360 and predictably ahead of all the air coolers.

The Liquid Freezer III remains a top recommendation of ours, though we do find its contact frame solution frustrating for Intel. On AMD, it’s much simpler.

Moving to the air coolers, the victor of the noise-normalized category on pure performance is the Noctua NH-D15 G2 HBC for our Intel 250W bench or LBC for AMD. Previously, we found that the G2 HBC outperformed even its closest competitor, the A720, by a couple degrees. This gap alone is impressive, as finding more than single-degree differences between air coolers is rare. Noctua’s work on the high base convexity cooler really worked for Intel -- but it’s also the recipient of our Best Mechanical Design category, so we’ll save that discussion.

On AMD 200W testing when noise-normalized, we also found Noctua’s D15 G2 LBC (or its flatter model) to be the current best noise-normalized air cooler result, behind only a huge stack of liquid coolers.

As some honorable mentions for runners-up here, since most are in the market for something cheaper, the ID Cooling Frozn A720 Black takes a clean second place in both our Intel and AMD CPU cooler testing. The Frozn A720 well balanced between the 2 platforms. It’s a relatively large tower that may have some clearance issues in some cases, but its $56 price-point makes it one of the more affordable, competitive coolers, and it’s $100 below the D15 G2.

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Best Mechanical Design CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 G2

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

The next award is for Best Mechanical Design. This covers the total execution of every physical feature of the cooler: Pressure distribution, laser scans, ease-of-installation features, a highly usable design, aesthetics, and the cooling itself. This year, we can easily give it to the Noctua NH-D15 G2. Like last year’s winner for this category, which was the Assassin IV, Noctua’s NH-D15 G2 isn’t a good value cooler (it’s $150, which is insane for an air cooler) -- but this category isn’t for value. We can still appreciate the engineering.

It’s extremely well-built and takes careful consideration of factors often ignored by other cooling solutions. The NH-D15 G2 was secretly developing something similar to what we showed with some custom-made Scythe cooler coldplates that we had Scythe make early this year, which was trying to game the coldplate convexity to better match the CPU heat spreader’s surface concavity or flatness. 

Noctua was working on this for years and launched three models: The standard G2, HBC (or high-base convexity), and the LBC (low base convexity, sorry, Long Beach City) models subtly modify the convexity or flatness of the coldplate to better pair with deeply deformed Intel 13th and 14th Gen CPUs or with the relative flatness of AMD’s AM5 and AM4 CPUs with the LBC. Standard is meant to work on anything. We used our 3D laser scanner that we bought for cooler testing on the D15 G2 and discovered that the names really match the curvature.

We found that this wasn’t a gimmick and that there were actual, measurable and repeatable differences in benchmarks.

Noctua also lands on this list for its careful attention to detail on the fans, which it pairs and matches with slight RPM offsets intentionally in order to avoid a potential beat frequency phenomenon that could be annoying for some users. We have an interview with one of Noctua’s team members to talk about the engineering topics behind this. 

The D15 G2 also had excellent pressure distribution as a combination of its mounting hardware and the coldplate, shown in our mix of pressure maps across AM4 and Intel. 

An included washer mod added some further fine-tuning and small touches, though it was also clearly an attempt to try and bulk-on a value-add with the high price.

Thermally, the D15 G2 didn’t blow away any of the other coolers by massive margins. It’s a good cooler, but spending $120 more than competition doesn’t mean it’s suddenly competing with a 360mm liquid cooler. The G2 with the HBC solution and a washer mod ran at 52.5 degrees delta T in our review results for the 250W Intel heat load, which was better than coolers like the Peerless Assassin by several degrees (and is impressive), but predictably behind a high-performance liquid cooler. The physics just won’t support beating water and the huge surface area of a radiator. Being realistic about performance expectations is healthy, though, and Noctua never claimed that.
We appreciate what Noctua has done with its mechanical and thermal engineering. The company may move slowly, but thus far, it has moved with purpose. As we said in our review, this is the type of thing you buy if you have your heart set on it and can afford it. You are buying Noctua’s name with the G2 and, likewise, its support. It has already delivered one free update for owners of G2s with a relatively minor rattle complaint.

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Innovative: be quiet! Light Base 600 Case Review & Benchmarksjimmy_thang December 13, 2024

We evaluate be quiet!’s Light Base 600’s specs, alternatives, build quality, design, thermals, and more

The Highlights

• The Light Base 600 has the ability to lay horizontally, resembling older IBM-style PCs.
• The Light Base 600 is expensive for a dual-chamber case and our unit had a large panel gap
• With clever mechanical use of case stands and slotted top and bottom panels, the case can also be inverted or laid-out standard
• Original MSRP:$150-$195
• Release Date: September 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today we’re reviewing the Light Base 600 by be quiet!. It’s a big deviation from the company’s monolithic towers with foam padding and is their first dual-chamber case. Be quiet! has gotten attention for designing this case with three presentations in mind: Standard, flat in traditional, old-school “desktop computer” design, and inverted. All of these have been done before, but be quiet!’s approach is simple and overall brilliant: To go flat, you remove the feet by turning them (like screws). To go inverted, you swap the feet to the other panel, which uses a slot-and-groove solution to notch them into place. This is fast enough that you could change it just because you’re bored of it or want to present the glass to a different side of the room.

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 13, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing, Writing

Patrick Lathan

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets
Tim Phetdara

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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The Light Base 600 is a dual-chamber with four SKUs, ranging from $150 to $195 in price. Our variant is $195 because it’s white and comes with case fans. The Light Base 900 is a larger variation on this. We’re reviewing the 600 since testing for these reviews is a big commitment, but the general concepts apply to both, just scaled up on the 900.

Light Base 600 Specs

Motherboard compatibility	ATX, M-ATX, Mini-ITX
Case Type	Midi-Tower
PSU	PS2 ATX (not included)
Dimensions (L x W x H in mm)	450 x 305 x 435
Material	Steel (SGCC), ABS, Glass
Light Base 600 LX Weight (kg)	12.1 (net) / 14.6 (gross)
Light Base 600 DX Weight (kg)	11.5 (net) / 14.0 (gross)
I/O Panel	1x USB 3.2 Gen. 2 Type C, 2x USB 3.2 Type A, HD Audio (combined), ARGB controller, Reset button, Power button
PCI Slots	7
Drive Bays	up to 4x 2.5" (2 included)up to 2x 3.5" (1 included)
Light Base 600 LX Preinstalled fans (mm) / (rpm)	Side: 3x Light Wings LX Reversed 120mm PWM Rear: 1x Light Wings LX 120mm PWM
Light Base 600 DX Preinstalled fans (mm) / (rpm)	--
Maximum fans (mm)	Top: 2x 140 / 3x 120 Side: 3x 120 Bottom: 2x 140 / 3x 120 Rear: 1x 120
Optional radiators (mm)	Top: 120 / 140 / 240 / 280 / 360 Side: 120 / 240 Bottom: 120 / 140 / 240 / 280 / 360 Rear: 120
Maximum Dimensions (mm)	CPU cooler: up to 170 PSU: up to 200 GPU: 400
ARGB connector	3-pin
MSRP	Light Base 600 DX (Black): $150 Light Base 600 DX (White): $160 Light Base 600 LX (Black): $185 Light Base 600 LX (White): $195

Specs copied from manufacturer materials, please read review for our own measurements and opinions

Light Base 600 Alternatives

be quiet!’s key competitors for this include basically everyone, since dual-chamber cases have been so popular in recent years. If you’re thinking of buying this case, other cases you should know about include this quick list:

• Lian Li’s O11 series, including the Vision, Evo series (watch our review), and other variants, which jump-started this entire case archetype in the current generation
• Hyte Y60 & Y70, which give a new take on the concept with a cut-corner front that has been picked up by NZXT
• NZXT’s H5 (watch our review), H7 (watch our review), and H9 series of cases vary in their similarities, but share some concepts
• Montech’s King 95 and King 65 series, but especially the 95, for affordable dual-chamber options
• Antec’s C8 cases, which we’ve found to be relatively good thermal performers for the price
• Corsair’s 6500 Series cases, which we wouldn’t recommend overall (read our review)

And tons of others. We’ve left a lot out, but you get the idea: This is a crowded segment. A lot of these cases are in the $150 to $220 price range. A few are cheaper, like the empty Montech King 95 cases at $90 to $120 and the empty Antec C8, similarly priced.

It’ll be a big fight, but be quiet! does at least immediately differentiate itself with some unique features, one of which is their giant light bar that wraps the case. It was done this way so be quiet! could achieve the rotation without losing symmetry when you move the case around. In fact, all of this case had to be designed with symmetry in mind. That’s what gives the cheaper flexibility than more mechanically-intensive inversion processes from other cases -- but it’s also limiting in some areas.

Light Base 600 Basics

For the basics: Our version of this case includes 4x 120mm fans pre-installed as side intake and rear exhaust when it's in its traditional configuration. You could also shift these to the bottom as intake in a traditional orientation or, if rotated flat, they could be used as a side-to-side flow path. This on its own is pretty interesting and is one of the tests we ran. 

Other small fit-and-finish issues include a panel gap between the glass front and side, which is large enough that you’d need a taxi to get from one side to the other... The glass panels also diverge as they approach the bottom, with the bottom edge protruding slightly despite a flush top edge. We’ll come back to the fit-and-finish detail later though.

Getting into the big details:

The Build

We've criticized be quiet! in the past for its complicated case inversion processes. When we reviewed the Dark Base Pro 900, it took about 45 minutes to figure out disassembling and reassembling the case and sorting through the ridiculous variety and amount of screws and hardware. be quiet! must have taken that criticism to heart (even if 7 years later), because the Light Base 600 can be inverted in under ten seconds with no real screws at all (the design doc says 30 seconds, but that's with a system inside). 

The case feet can be pulled off by rotating them 90 degrees, then either placed on the top panel to invert the case or on the side panel to flip it on its side. It's not perfect: the feet don't lock and they go crooked as you slide the case around. They also feel fragile enough to damage by hand if positioned in the wrong spot. The ease of use outweighs the downsides, but the downsides were avoidable in design. Either way, once it’s done, these concerns go away.

This case also includes one of the simplest vertical GPU conversion systems we've seen. You take out all the horizontal slot covers, screw a bar across the back of the case, and adjust the built-in GPU support down a couple of notches.

The horizontal orientation is the most unique in the current era of computing, though it definitely used to be the standard. This old style is so liked in the retro scene that SilverStone made an April Fool’s case that accidentally became popular enough that there’s some real demand to make it.

The downside is that the Light Base 600 isn't a particularly small case, and because of its dual-chamber design, it's more than 32cm tall on its side. The 900 has even larger dimensions.

Backed against a wall, the case requires a minimum of 50cm up to the front edge of the case, requiring a deeper table to comfortably accommodate a keyboard and mouse if placed directly in front of the case. 

The dimensions make it impractical to use in the old IBM PC layout, but if you want to try it anyway, we recommend using a monitor arm rather than resting weight on the glass panel. We wouldn’t recommend setting it up with a monitor directly on it, especially since tempered glass can shatter without impact in some situations.

With the total monitor arm and monitor configuration, the setup could be made to look pretty unique -- we like the concept like this. Most of our desks are either 24” or 30” deep, with a few at 36” for filming. With that old-school setup with the computer right in front of the user, the 30” deep desks would only have 10” (or 25 cm) to spare for the keyboard and mouse. Plan your desk sizing appropriately. It’d obviously not be a problem if the system is off to the side of the keyboard and mouse. 

The desk in the image above is 30” deep and the lowest monitor can conflict with the top of the case, but this gives you an idea for sizing. You could definitely build a good-looking retro setup with the right color lighting and furniture, not that the 600 is confined to that style, but it would look good. You would just need a deep table. 

Fittingly for a case called the Light Base, there are dual LED and fan hubs in the back chamber. These have a total of 12x 4-pin fan and 12x 3-pin ARGB connections. The 600 LX's four stock fans occupy four of each type of plug (no daisy-chaining), but that still leaves eight unused pairs. Each hub has its own power and control inputs, allowing for two separate zones.

Our key focus is performance, but when LEDs are done, we still look for quality. We think the lighting is executed excellently; the diffuser bars work well and the LED animations are smooth. It looks good in a night-time or lights-out setup. 

Out of the box, all LEDs are set to be quiet! orange. The manual provides a full table of built-in lighting effects and instructions for syncing with external input. We thought the manual was well-written here. The cabling for the stock ARGB fans is a little overwhelming, but the light bars and their associated wires are tucked completely out of the way. 

Our one complaint is that the LED button and the reset button are exactly the same size and have no labels - though you’d probably only make that mistake once.

The Light Base 600 is another case without a support pillar between its two glass panels, giving us a top panel that could theoretically bend down. In practice, the top and bottom panels are interlocked with the front panel, keeping it solid as long as the case is assembled.

The steel side panel is fully ventilated, although the side intake vent and the PSU are the only areas where that's necessary. The side filter is removable for cleaning or additional airflow, which is an advantage over related designs like the HS 420 (read our review) and HYTE Y70 (read our review) where the side filters are glued in place. We’re happy to see that flexibility from be quiet!. Unfortunately, the top and bottom filters aren’t as flexible and are built into their respective panels: if you set up a horizontal build, some fans will exhaust through a filter that isn’t intended to be removed, which will create unnecessary impedance.

Primary radiator support in the case’s traditional orientation is at the top and bottom of the case, which both support up to 360mm sizes. 360mm radiators aren't officially supported in the side mount and most won't fit at all with the 39.6cm of clearance between the top and bottom of the case.

The Light Base 600 has cutouts for back-connect boards, but normal ATX boards overlap all the cutouts along the bottom edge. Small fan and I/O cables can be snaked through the back-connect holes anyway, but we expect clear, premeditated cable routes. The storage behind the motherboard is deep, as is typical for dual-chamber cases, but it can be difficult to work in once that space is occupied by cables. The cable tie points are hard to reach once PSU cables are in the way, with the cable cover, HDD bracket, and fan and lighting hubs contributing to a cramped feeling. We ended up just wadding all the cables into the channel and snapping the cable cover shut on top. It’s still easier than the Lancool 207, at least (read our review).

We'd like to see a way to screw the cover down, but the cable channel is deep enough that it's unlikely to be necessary.

Drive storage is a complicating factor for cable management. The stock Light Base 600 only supports 2x 2.5" drives and 1x 3.5" drive, with the two smaller drives mounted to the cable cover, which requires leaving enough slack to open it. The stock bottom bracket can only mount a single 3.5" drive, but it has room for a be quiet! HDD Cage 2 (purchased separately) which fits either an additional 3.5" drive or two 2.5" drives. Using the bottom bracket at all reduces access to cable cutouts and one of the two fan and lighting hubs.

There's a gap between the two glass panes; it's a matter of personal taste as to whether that's a problem, but it's definitely intentional and known since the case shipped with a strip of cardboard in that gap. 

The gaps where light bars meet (top and bottom) definitely aren't intentional, though, and be quiet! didn’t do anything to minimize that.

This is the most brightly-lit, attention-grabbing area of the case, and it needs to look perfect. The gaps don't belong on a $195 case the way our case is set up, and the deviation at the top and bottom edges of the glass makes for a messy execution where other areas are done to a higher standard. The panel gap isn’t great for looks, but could contribute to dust ingress, especially in a horizontal orientation where it would be exposed directly up. We all know how dust collects on glass surfaces.

Some smaller points we want be quiet! to address in future iterations: First, the PSU fitment was unnecessarily tight, to the point that we had a harder time than necessary getting it installed. 

Second, even though the GPU support still works when the case is inverted, it may be weaker since it can't be flipped. 

Light Base 600 Thermal Benchmarks

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Our model came with 3 reverse blade fans on the side and a traditional fan on the back.

We have a few key configurations of the Light Base 600 that we’re testing:

• Stock, which is standing in its traditional orientation with the included fans where they come
• Stock without a side filter
• Inverted, which is self-evident
• Flat with the fans left where they were, which becomes bottom intake. For the horizontal case testing, we removed the rubber bumpers in the side panel and we installed the feet in those slots. If we were testing the case without the feet there and just on the rubber bumpers then the bottom intake would be completely suffocated and far worse than what you’re going to see in our tests
• Flat with left intake and right exhaust

CPU Thermals: Full Speed (Light Base Only)

We’ll start with a chart of just the Light Base results.

With all case fans at full speed, the Light Base 600 LX averaged 48 degrees Celsius above ambient all-core and 52 on the P-Cores in its default configuration. Removing the optional side filter reduced the all-core temperature by 1.7 degrees, which is a large drop for a side filter only. It’s relatively restrictive.

Fully inverting the case didn't change temperatures enough to exit the margin of error, which is encouraging since, for the most part, it shouldn’t. The GPU would be most prone to change here.

Flipping the case on its side definitely hurt CPU thermal performance, with an all-core average of 51 and P-Core average of 55. Left in their stock positions, the three intake fans are obstructed by the desk surface when the case is put on its side. We intended to fix that with the left intake/right exhaust horizontal configuration, but with a focus on GPU thermals, so CPU thermals didn't change significantly versus the first horizontal result. You can see that here.

Flipping the case on its side with the intake fans against the desk surface also raised the noise level up to 32.1 dBA, versus 30.9 dBA in the stock or inverted configurations. This is actually noticeable. It’s also really cool: Previously, our less precise testing approach to acoustics would not have been able to surface this difference in numbers even though you’d be able to hear it. That’s because we were limited by the noise floor and measurement tools. Now, with our hemi-anechoic chamber that the audience has helped us build, we can actually detect with tools what the human ear can already hear. That’s why we have this chamber. People forget that ears are incredible at their job and that representing it with a microphone is very difficult, so when they ask why we’d build such a chamber, this is exactly the reason. We can get closer to measuring what you actually perceive.

CPU Thermals: Full Speed (Competitive)

Here’s the full chart.

It's fitting that be quiet!'s case is among the quietest on the chart when at 100% speed, bracketed by the HYTE Y60 at 30.1 dBA and Fractal Pop Air (watch our review) at 31.3 dBA, but there are no obvious noise-damping features other than the use of Light Wings fans.

The Y60 (watch our review) may be equally quiet, but it's also much hotter with just its stock fans, averaging 51 degrees all-core versus the 600 LX's 48, so that is an advantage for the LX. We know based on past experience that the Antec C8 is the dual-chamber case to beat in terms of overall thermals, 46 degrees in this particular test (albeit with a higher noise level of 37.1 dBA), while the (glass-fronted) King 95 Pro (read our coverage) averaged 43 degrees (at 36.8 dBA). We'll get to noise-normalized thermals in a moment.

GPU Thermals: Full Speed (Be Quiet!)

GPU full speed is up now: 

The Light Base 600 LX kept our GPU at 52 degrees Celsius above ambient with the memory temperature at 60 and hotspot at 68. Removing the side filter improved temperatures by 2.2 degrees for the GPU, which is a huge climb for just a filter. be quiet! has room to improve this area. 

Inversion had a mildly negative effect, raising the GPU average to 54 degrees. The horizontal configuration was worse still at 55 degrees for the GPU, 63 for the memory, and 71 for the hotspot. Keeping the case horizontal but shifting to the left intake/right exhaust configuration dramatically lowered temperatures, down to 41 GPU, 44 memory, and 53 hotspot. This is the equivalent of a bottom-intake configuration in a case that's oriented normally, but with unobstructed intake.

GPU Thermals: Full Speed (Competitive)

Here’s the competitive chart. All of the results with the fans in their stock locations are among the weakest on the chart, with the baseline out-of-the-box result falling behind even the Y60. The left intake/right exhaust configuration performed significantly better, tying the C8 ARGB's 41 degree GPU average and significantly outperforming the King 95 Pro's 46 degree average. As a reminder, this was done with just the included fans. All we did was move them. We didn’t want to add fans because it starts to become arbitrary and potentially unfair, but moving them really helped here. The horizontal configuration has the greatest potential for cooling, since a clear unidirectional airflow path can be created without obstruction. You’re not dealing with angled intake from the side, so there is a huge amount of potential here.

CPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

The Light Base 600 LX's low noise at full speed means it has a shot in our noise normalized test, where all case fans are tuned down to hit our 27 dBA threshold. We normalize these in our hemi-anechoic chamber to get the granularity needed for a fair test.

50 degrees Celsius above ambient all-core and 54 P-Core ties the Antec C8 ARGB (read our review), but the King 95 Pro averaged 47 all-core, and cases with simple front intake like the Antec Flux Pro (read our review) and Lian Li Lancool 207 continue to dominate the top of the chart. 

GPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

GPU thermal performance was already weak with the case fans at full speed, and with reduced fan speeds, the 600 LX is the hottest case on this chart other than the King 65 Pro. This is a strong argument for the horizontal left-to-right airflow configuration. These were all at the same noise levels. We’ve normalized them for this test. This is not a good result for be quiet!.

Standardized Fans: GPU Thermals

Because we were forced to mount the 140mm fans in the bottom of the case for our standardized fan test, we have an opportunity to see the case's bottom intake performance. 

An average GPU temperature of 44 degrees Celsius above ambient is more competitive than the other GPU thermal results we've seen from the 600 LX so far, close to the King 95 Pro and C8 ARGB's tied 43 degree averages, but that still only places the LX in the middle of the chart. This is also effectively a test of the Light Base 600 DX, since we would have performed all tests on that case using our standardized set of fans.

VRM Thermals: Noise-Normalized

Finishing off with VRM and system memory thermals during the noise normalized test, the 600 LX's performance is again unimpressive. 35 degrees above ambient for the VRM is warmer than the C8 ARGB's 33 degrees and the King 95 Pro's 31 degrees, and although the stack is ordered differently for memory temperatures, both the C8 ARGB and King 95 Pro were cooler than the 600 LX's 27 degrees. We also know from our full speed results that these sensors didn't respond strongly to the horizontal left intake/right exhaust reconfiguration.

Light Base 600 Conclusion

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The Light Base 600 LX is on the expensive end of dual-chamber cases with included fans, especially when taking into account the thermal performance of the Antec C8 ARGB and King 95 Pro. Both of those cases also have fanless SKUs that are cheaper than the Light Base 600's fanless SKUs. 

The primary reason for buying the Light Base 600 over any of those other options (including the NZXT H9 Flow, which we haven't tested) is the wraparound light bar, so we're at least happy to see that the light bar looks good in person, with bright, evenly-diffused LEDs. It was critical that they executed on this feature well and they did do a good job on it. There were a couple caveats surrounding the fit and finish, like the panel flushness.

The horizontal option is also a unique selling point, but it's one that few people have the desk space to try. But this is a well-liked presentation layout, it ends up looking better than you might expect when looking at it vertically, and it’s a unique feature that is also executed overall well. It’s also mechanically simple. You’ll just have to plan your furniture more than typical, which isn’t so bad once you’re aware of the sizing.

If you do buy a Light Base 600 and you want to maximize thermal performance, we suggest using the horizontal configuration with side intake fans pushing directly into the GPU and exhaust fan(s) pulling hot air out of the opposite side. 

A few things to be careful of: If using a closed-loop liquid cooler, or “AIO,” with a pump in the block, you wouldn’t want to bottom mount it when the case is on its side. You should never bottom-mount a liquid cooler with the pump at the highest point in the loop, which that would do. Mounting the radiator to the side -- which was the “top” before going flat -- would be best. This will still put one side of the radiator tank at the highest point, which can create some bubbling noises in loops with less liquid or as they permeate over a 5-year period, but wouldn’t lead to catastrophic failure like a bottom-mount will.

All of this changes if you have the pump somewhere else in the loop, like the radiator.

It's good to see some movement from be quiet!, but although back-connect compatibility is fairly new, dual-chamber cases and ARGB LEDs are years-old trends. It'll take some time for the company to become a leader in cases again, rather than a follower. The company has also deviated from some of be quiet!’s expectations, which isn’t a bad thing. Fractal deviated as well and it worked out well for them. 

We like the case overall for its unique presentation. It is mechanically simple and it works well. Aside from that, there are no revolutionary changes to the build process or features. 

But once cases clear a bar for acceptable performance and for functionality, what matters most is that you like the way it looks. This case clears those bars. If you’re a big fan of the layout, we’re not seeing any major detractors to advise against a purchase.

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Intel Arc B580 'Battlemage' GPU Review & Benchmarks vs. NVIDIA RTX 4060, AMD RX 7600, & Morejimmy_thang December 11, 2024

We test the B580’s ray tracing capabilities, power efficiency, and performance across numerous games at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p

The Highlights

• The B580 represents the first graphics card that uses Intel’s Battlemage GPU architecture
• The B580’s idle power consumption needs improvement and we couldn’t get the GPU to run Cyberpunk at RT Ultra settings
• The B580 highlights how Battlemage has improved tremendously over Intel’s Alchemist GPU architecture
• Original MSRP: $250
• Release Date: December 13, 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Intel’s Battlemage B580 GPU launches at $250. In our testing, the card has improved massively over the company’s original Alchemist GPU launch, so it’s already in a better spot than previously. By price, the B580 is positioned to compete with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 $300 GPU and the AMD RX 7600 at $250. Both NVIDIA and AMD have new GPUs launching in early January, but until they’re out, we can’t evaluate their performance.
What we can say is that, out of the gate, the B580 is far more reliable than the Alchemist cards were at launch. Intel has definitely improved. It still has issues and it was still shipping driver updates until the last minute of testing, but the company has objectively improved.

Editor's note: This was originally published on December 12, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Patrick Lathan

Testing, Editing

Mike Gaglione

Chart QC

Jeremy Clayton

Camera

Tim Phetdara
Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Frametimes have largely been smoothed over, but remain a potential pain point for Intel in some games. Idle power consumption is also a pain point; however, overall value and throughput are competitive, and ray tracing performance is particularly competitive, especially against AMD.

We also found that the B580 scales extremely well with higher resolutions, seeing the most uplift over the 4060 or 7600 at 4K and 1440p, and often losing that ground at 1080p.

It’s an interesting review packed with a ton of new information, including a complete overhaul of our GPU test bench to an overclocked 9800X3D platform.

Let’s get started.

Intel B580 Overview, Pricing, & Specs

Here’s a quick refresher on the current market for GPU prices, but remember that the RTX 50 series is rumored to launch next month, followed by rumors of new AMD GPUs. 

GPU Price Comparison | GamersNexus | Early December, 2024

	Newegg Price	Amazon Price
Intel B580 (MSRP $250)	$250	NFS
Intel A770	$230	$280
Intel A750	$240	$200
Intel A580	$170	$170
NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 8GB	$400	$400
NVIDIA RTX 4060	$300	$295
NVIDIA RTX 3060	$280	$270
NVIDIA RTX 3050	$170	$170
AMD RX 6600	$190	$200
AMD RX 6600 XT	$240	$260
AMD RX 7600	$250	$252
AMD RX 7700 XT	$400	$420

For today: The B580 has an MSRP of $250 and was available for preorder on Newegg at this price. The prior Intel A770 is available for $230 to $280 for the 16GB model, with the A750 at $200 to $240 and A580 at $170. NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 is a main competitor, typically at $300, alongside the RX 7600 at price parity with the B580. These will be the two key comparisons.

One step up, the 4060 Ti 8GB and 7700 XT are both around $400 to $420 right now, making them primary upgrade options another class up.

Intel B580 Specs

We already covered the B580 specs in a video, but here are the basics again:

The card launches ahead of the B570 (watch our coverage), which launches next month. The B580 is a relatively small 20 Xe2 core configuration on the Battlemage architecture, making it smaller than the A750 or A770 in configuration size. Intel hasn’t yet announced 700-series cards in the Battlemage series.

The B580 has a 190W default TDP, runs on 1x 8-pin power connector, and is cut down to PCIe 4.0 x8, which is a potential downside for anyone on old platforms. We’d have to look at that separately in the future.

Test Bench Overhaul

We have a brand new test bench for all of this. We’ve moved from an overclocked 12700K to an AMD 9800X3D, which marks the first time we’ve used an AMD CPU as our permanent GPU test bench solution in the nearly 16 years we’ve been running now. The 9800X3D gives us far better headroom and scaling to see the impact of high-end GPUs that should be coming out soon. We have it overclocked to 5.4GHz all-core and under a 420mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III.

GPU Game Test Suite | 2025 Methodology | GamersNexus

Game	Resolution & Settings	Release Year
Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark	1080p/High 1440p/High 4K/High *Upscaling is not used. 100% for all tests. Game forces selection, selected FSR. Full RT disabled.	2024
(Ray Tracing) Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark	1080p/High Raster/Medium RT/FSR Quality 1440p/High Raster/Medium RT/FSR Quality 4K/High Raster/Medium RT/FSR Quality *FSR selected as upscaling method for all tests. Scaling set to "FSR Quality" equivalent. Full Ray Tracing set to Medium.	2024
F1 24	1080p/High 1440p/High 4K/High	2024
(Ray Tracing) F1 24	1080p/RT Ultra 1440p/RT Ultra 4K/RT Ultra *Based on Ultra High preset.	2024
Dragon's Dogma 2	1080p/Max 1440p/Max 4K/Max *All settings maxed except for RT (this is not an in-game preset).	2024
(Ray Tracing) Dragon's Dogma 2	1080p/Max RT 1440p/Max RT 4K/Max RT *All settings maxed (this is not an in-game preset).	2024
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Benchmark	1080p/Maximum 1440p/Maximum 4K/Maximum	2024
Resident Evil 4 (2023)	1080p/Prioritize Graphics 1440p/Prioritize Graphics 4K/Prioritize Graphics	2023
(Ray Tracing) Resident Evil 4 (2023)	1080p/FSR Quality/Max RT 1440p/FSR Quality/Max RT 4K/FSR Quality/Max RT *Based on "Maximum" preset.	2023
Baldur's Gate 3	1080p/DX11/Ultra-Custom 1440p/DX11/Ultra-Custom 4K/DX11/Ultra-Custom *Custom settings.	2023
Starfield	1080p/Ultra 1440p/Ultra 4K/Ultra	2023
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty	1080p/Ultra 1440p/Ultra 4K/Ultra	2023
(Ray Tracing) Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty	1080p/RT Medium 1440p/RT Medium 4K/RT Medium 1080p/RT Ultra 1440p/RT Ultra 4K/RT Ultra *Based on Ray Tracing: Ultra and Ray Tracing: Medium presets.	2023
Dying Light 2 Stay Human	1080p/DX12/High-Custom 1440p/DX12/High-Custom 4K/DX12/High-Custom *Based on "High" preset but with DX12 and associated features.	2022
(Ray Tracing) Dying Light 2 Stay Human	1080p/DX12/FSR Quality/RT High Quality 1440p/DX12/FSR Quality/RT High Quality 4K/DX12/FSR Quality/RT High Quality *Based on "High Quality Raytracing" preset.	2022
Total War: Warhammer III	1080p/Ultra 1440p/Ultra 4K/Ultra	2022
NOTES	Dynamic resolution, upscaling, VSync, and VRS are disabled unless otherwise noted, even if they would normally be enabled by the in-game preset. RT features are disabled in tests not prefixed with (Ray Tracing). Games are run in exclusive fullscreen mode if available.

Our games list includes these. Not all of these will be shown in each review, but they are all tested. We’ve added Dragon’s Dogma 2 from 2024, Black Myth: Wukong from 2024, Baldur’s Gate 3 from 2023 -- which will be too easy for high-end GPUs, but is a good match for the B580, Starfield from 2023, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail from 2024, Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty from 2023, and all the others you see above.

Cards Tested

Card	Time Tested
NVIDIA RTX 4090 Cybertank	December, 2024
AMD RX 7800 XT Ref	December, 2024
EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black 12GB	December, 2024
ASUS RTX 4060 Dual	December, 2024
Intel Arc B580 Ref	December, 2024
Sparkle Arc A580 Orc	December, 2024
EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black 8GB	December, 2024
XFX RX 6600 CORE	December, 2024
PowerColor RX 6600 XT Red Devil	December, 2024
XFX RX 6500 XT Black	December, 2024
Sparkle Arc A750 Titan	December, 2024
AMD RX 7600 Ref	December, 2024
Acer Arc A770 BiFrost 16GB	December, 2024
EVGA RTX 3060 Ti FTW3	December, 2024
XFX RX 6700 XT MERC Black	December, 2024
NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti FE 8GB	December, 2024
EVGA RTX 2060 KO	December, 2024
EVGA GTX 1060 SSC 6GB	December, 2024
XFX RX 7700 XT Black	December, 2024
NVIDIA RTX 4070 FE	December, 2024
Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro	December, 2024
EVGA GTX 1070 SC	December, 2024
Sparkle Arc A380 Elf	December, 2024
Colorful RTX 3070 BiliBili	December, 2024
EVGA GTX 1650 SC Ultra Gaming	December, 2024

We’ve tested about 25 GPUs for this launch. That list does not include the RTX 4080, 4080 Super, 4070 Ti or Super, 7900 XT or GRE, and similar high-end cards. You can find scaling data in our prior benchmarks for those.

We added the 7900 XTX and RTX 4090 for a ceiling. 

The reason for the cuts is time -- rolling into the end of year with team scheduling and our own travel, we wanted to allocate more testing time to older hardware or lower-end stuff to represent users considering an upgrade. That means we cut the high-end stuff for the GTX 1060 (watch our revisit), 1070 (watch our review), RTX 2060 (watch our review), GTX 1650 (watch our review), and similar cards. We’ll add higher-end GPUs in for the January launches, but they’re out of the price range of the B580.

As far as cards with multiple VRAM configurations, we ran the “default” or first-launched VRAM configuration wherever an option was present. 

Finally on the test bench side, we’ve added power efficiency testing and idle power consumption testing with calibrated tools.

We have a lot more to test, but this article is huge already and we have a busy time ahead of us with some travel.

Let’s get into the benchmarks.

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B580 Gaming Benchmarks

FFXIV - 4K

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is up now at 4K first.

At 4K, the Intel Arc B580 ran at 47 FPS AVG, with lows exceptionally close to the average. The B580 has a staggering lead of 28.6% over the RTX 4060, which is elevated as compared to its lead at 1440p and 1080p. The RTX 4060 (watch our review) is behind in lows also; although they remain consistent with its average.

The B580 also leads the RTX 4060 Ti at 15% ahead, the A770 by 16.5%, A750 by an impressive 27.9%. The RX 7600 is around the same price as the B580, but struggles at 4K in this test at 31.5 FPS AVG.

Users of the GTX 1060 6GB card would experience an uplift of about 193% moving to the B580, with the 1070 seeing 110% and the 3050 similar.

As we saw in our 4060 review, the 3060 Ti (watch our review) has a massive memory bandwidth advantage over its successors and embarrasses the 4060 and 4060 Ti cards here.

From what we’ve tested lately that’s better than the B580. That list includes the $450-$480 7800 XT at 22% better and the RTX 4070 non-Super at 27% better, among the flagships.

FFXIV - 1440p

At 1440p, the gap narrows in some places. The B580 is running at a completely playable 86 FPS AVG with good lows. Its lead over lower cards has decreased: 3.4% against the 4060 Ti (watch our review), 9% against the A770 (down from 16.5%), 19% over the A750 and RTX 4060 (from around 28% before), and 31% over the RX 7600 (watch our review).

The RX 7800 XT jumps to 40% from 22% and the 4070 jumps to 36% from 27%. The $400 RX 7700 XT (watch our review) leads at 98 FPS to 86 FPS AVG on the B580, but is more expensive.

The B580 looks good here despite a reduction in its lead from 4K.

FFXIV - 1080p

1080p squishes everything together and reduces the B580’s advantage.

The B580 at 124 FPS AVG is now just 10 FPS ahead of the A770 and RTX 4060, or about 10%. The B580 went from a 28.6% lead at 4K to 19% at 1440p to 10% over the RTX 4060. 

At 1440p, the RX 6700 XT (watch our review) was marginally below the B580 and is now ahead at 1080p. The B580 also had nearly a 15% lead over the RTX 4060 Ti at 4K, but now is behind. The 4060 Ti leads at 133 FPS, or an advantage of 7.6%. That’s a huge swing.

Starfield - 1440p

Starfield is up now, tested at 1440p.

The B580 isn’t as strong in this one as it was elsewhere. Starfield is also a game that was not functional on Arc at its launch, so running at all is already better than last time -- though that’s a low bar.

The B580 ends up behind the RX 7600, RTX 4060, and 4060 Ti in this benchmark. It’s beating the A770, A750, and A580 cards from Intel’s last gen.

The 4060 leads by about 17%, with the 4060 Ti in an insurmountable 42% lead. The 7600 is closer, at 5% ahead. 

The biggest downside here is the frametime pacing. Intel’s B580 struggles with 0.1% lows and 1% lows, which are indicative of a deeper per-frame problem that requires a frametime plot to investigate. We’ll explore that later in this review, closer to the conclusion.

Starfield - 1080p

At 1080p, the B580 ran at 51 FPS AVG, giving the RTX 4060 a 10 FPS AVG lead, but an even bigger lead in lows. Although the 4060 has an advantage of 21% in average framerate, the real difference is in frametime pacing that we’ll see closer at the end of this review.

The RX 7600’s lead is now 4%, with the 4060 Ti at 44%.

Intel’s B580 leads the A770 by an impressive generational 16%, despite a lower core count configuration. That’s a huge win for Intel over its own hardware. Its lead over the A750 is 27%. Despite these gains, the B580 is not that competitive in Starfield.

Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil at 4K is pretty interesting. The B580 roughly matches the 4060 Ti, with a marginal deficit on 0.1% lows. The lead over the 4060 is massive, benefiting the B580 by 31% in average FPS. It also holds an advantage in lows. The lead over the 7600 is 24%, with the generational lead over the A580 and A750 alike impressive.

This is a strong showing for Intel’s B580.

Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

At 1440p, the B580 maintains a competitive position: The card is fully playable at 85 FPS AVG with overall OK lows, albeit lower proportionally versus the neighboring A770 and RTX 3060 Ti. With the resolution drop, the 4060 Ti now leads the B580 by 7% from its rough equivalence before. B580 benefits from its memory bandwidth at 4K.

The lead over the RTX 4060 is reduced to a still-noteworthy 22.5%, down from 31%. The 7600 lead is reduced from 24% at 4K to 18% at 1440p.

Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

1080p weakens the B580’s position overall. The 4060 Ti now moves to 10% ahead. The B580’s lead over the 4060 is reduced to 19%, although this is still a big lead. Most notably though, we see the frametimes deviate more from the average: The 128 FPS AVG is accompanied by 74 FPS and 63 FPS 1% and 0.1% lows with the B580, whereas proportionally and based on neighbors, these figures should be in the 100-110 territory. The drop jumps out as different from the rest.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 4K

Baldur’s Gate 3 is up now, one of the most played games in the last year. Intel needs to do well in these types of critically acclaimed titles. Last round, we saw that Intel did better with Vulkan in Baldur’s Gate 3 than it did with Dx11, but was still disadvantaged in both APIs.

With Dx11 and 4K/Ultra, the B580 ran at 45 FPS AVG. The lows are reduced versus its immediate neighbors in the 4060 and 7600, both of which would be better experiences by frametimes alone, despite all looking approximately equal in average FPS. This is another for our frametime charts list at the end.

The B580 improves on the A750 by 6% and the A580 by 21%, falling behind the A770 in this one. The Arc cards are generally less competitive in frametime consistency in this game; however, they have significantly improved in their performance from a year ago.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - 1440p

Here’s 1440p.

The B580 ran at 74 FPS AVG, which is completely playable in this game. The lows are also acceptable in an objective sense -- it’s not a “bad” experience, but it’s also not as good as you’d get for frametime pacing from the RTX 3060 (watch our review), RTX 4060, or RX 6600 XT (watch our review).

The 6600 XT’s average framerate holds a 14% lead, with the 4060 at 8% ahead, breaking rank from a roughly tied average at 4K. The 7600 also climbs ahead, now matching the 6600 XT rather than the B580 AVG FPS as we saw at 4K. The 4060 Ti is 35% ahead of the B580 with its 100 FPS AVG.

Generationally, Intel improves over the Alchemist A750 by 7%, with a notable leap over the 62 FPS AVG of the A580.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty - 1440p

In Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty at 1440p, the B580 performs overall well. This is one of Intel’s strongest titles. 

At 1440p and with Ultra settings, without RT, the B580 lands at 53 FPS AVG in our in-game test within one of the cities. The B580 roughly matches the RTX 3070, although is lower in 0.1% lows and frametime consistency. The B580 leads the RTX 4060 in AVG FPS by 36%, the RX 7600 by a similarly large gulf, and the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB model by 12%. The 4060 Ti has stronger 0.1% lows, but not in a way which we think is worth the cost tradeoff.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty - 1080p

At 1080p, the B580 slips in the ranks below the 4060 Ti, which also carries a large advantage in 0.1% lows. 

The B580 technically leads the RTX 4060 in AVG FPS by 18%, but the 4060 pulls ahead in overall frametime consistency. The RX 7600 is in a similar boat.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1080p

Black Myth: Wukong is next. This is one of the few games where we use the built-in benchmark. It’s new to our test suite and it’s been pretty consistent. Dropping settings would obviously increase framerate, but we’re interested in this from a scaling standpoint.

At High settings, broadly speaking, the B580 still has a slight deficit in lows, but a far less noticeable one than some other games. It’s close enough to the RX 7600 and RTX 3060 that the experience would feel overall similar, although technically worse by measurement.

The RTX 4060 holds a significant lead in this test, up at 19% and 54 FPS AVG to the 46 FPS on the B580. Frametime consistency is also better. The 3060 Ti leads the 4060 and B580, with the 4060 Ti at 65 FPS AVG, or 42% ahead of the B580.

The B580 at least improved on the last generation, at 29% over the A750, and 38% over the A580. Intel is making big generational strides against itself here.

Black Myth: Wukong - 1440p

At 1440p, we’re bordering on synthetic test territory for the B580. But what matters most to us is the scaling, not the raw FPS.

At 35 FPS AVG, the B580 allows the 4060 a lead of 6.6%, down from 19% at 1080p. This is a huge swing in favor of the B580, which continues to scale more favorably at higher resolutions.

The 7600 falls below the B580 in average FPS and is roughly the same in lows. The B580 also leads the prior generation flagship from Intel, the A770, which was at 30 FPS AVG. We’re going to pick up the speed here now that patterns are establishing.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is up next. For our CPU testing, we benchmark inside the city to create an NPC workload on the CPU. For GPU testing, we test outside of the city and in a GPU-heavy area with fields, water, and structures.

At 1440p, the B580 ran at 44 FPS AVG with good lows. The GPU does much better here than in some of the prior tests and ends up keeping pace with the RTX 4060. The 7600, 4060, and B580 are all functionally equivalent. The 3060 Ti (watch our review) benefits from its memory bandwidth and leads this grouping.

This is a much better positioning for the B580 than the prior games.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, things shake-up to knock the B580 loose from its rough equivalence with the RX 7600 and RTX 4060. Now, the RTX 4060 holds a 13% lead, with the RX 7600 in an 11% lead. The B580 retains overall typical frametime pacing, which is good for Arc. It manages to hang in there, but it’s seen some losses as the resolution comes down.

Dying Light 2 - 1440p

Dying Light 2 is next. This one looks good for Intel Arc, including frametime consistency: The B580 runs at 63 FPS AVG, which has it ahead of the 4060 Ti, 4060, and 7600. It’s also ahead of all of these devices in 1% and 0.1% lows, in what’s a major victory for Intel considering its challenges in some other games.

The B580 ends up between the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT. The $400 7700 XT holds a lead in AVG FPS of 12%, despite being 60% more expensive. This is one of the stronger showings for Intel.

Dying Light 2 - 1080p

At 1080p, the B580 continues its good performance by outmatching the A770 and RTX 4060; however, it loses ground to the 4060 Ti that it had outperformed at 1440p. The 87 FPS AVG is well into playable territory and carries good lows. The die size is much smaller than an A770, so outperforming it is key here: Intel may be able to reduce some of its cost per card, which will help it compete long-term.

Intel B580 Ray Tracing Benchmarks

We’re moving on to ray tracing benchmarks. These are not comparable to the rasterized charts.

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Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 4K

Resident Evil 4 is up first. This is a relatively light workload for ray tracing and isn’t as distorted for one vendor or another as some other games.

This first chart is at 4K with Max RT, but with FSR set to quality for all devices. We have validated other upscaling solutions and found their performance to be roughly identical, so matching for just FSR agnostically allows us to control for image quality as well. Because we are using FSR, it is not native resolution. We don’t use FSR in our rasterized tests.

Here’s the 4K chart. The B580 ends up directly competing with the RTX 4060 Ti in the average framerate and in frametime consistency, with lows overall indicative of a comparable frame-to-frame interval to the 4060 Ti. It’s not far off from the RTX 3070. Intel’s B580 leads the RTX 4060 by 21%, at 50 FPS to 41 FPS AVG. The improvement over the A750 is similar. We need to run the 7600 back through this one still, but the 7700 XT and 6600 XT give an idea for AMD’s positioning.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 1440p

In this test, the Intel B580 runs at 75 FPS AVG with overall good lows. The 1% and 0.1% metrics are similar to what we see on the 3060 Ti, which outperforms the B580. Intel’s B580 manages to outperform the RTX 4060 by 6%, including proportional frametimes. It also outperforms the A770’s 71 FPS AVG, which was already relatively good for RT. AMD’s RX 7600 ran at 65 FPS AVG, giving the B580 nearly a 16% advantage while costing about the same.

The 4060 Ti’s 91 FPS result outdoes the B580’s 75 FPS by 21%, including scaling in the lows. The 7700 XT pushes further ahead, up to 106 FPS AVG. Both devices cost about 60% more than the B580, at around $400 for the 4060 Ti 8GB and 7700 XT alike.

Ray Tracing: Resident Evil 4 - 1080p

At 1080p and with the same FSR and RT settings, Resident Evil 4 positions the B580 now below the RTX 4060 -- though they’re functionally tied. It’s losing the advantage that we’ve now proven it typically has at higher resolutions. These two and the RX 7600 are closest in price, with the 7600 down at 85 FPS AVG and allowing the B580 a slight lead of 9%.

The 4060 Ti leads the B580 by 29%, with the 7700 XT 40% ahead of Battlemage.

Overall, Intel’s performance in this lighter RT test is competitive, especially for the price and in comparison to AMD. 

Ray Tracing: Dying Light 2 - 1080p

Dying Light 2 is a heavier RT workload and is tested with FSR Quality. 

At 1080p, the B580 ran at 65 FPS AVG and held consistent frametimes. It’s a little better than the A770 and similar in average to the 3060 Ti. The 4060 Ti leads the B580 with its 73 FPS AVG result, a gain of 12%. The B580 leads the 4060 by 13%. AMD falls behind in this test, with the 6700 XT now below the B580 and RTX 4060. The B580 ends up with nearly a 30% lead over the 6700 XT, which is a precarious spot for AMD. The lead over the RX 7600’s 45 FPS AVG is 44%.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1080p

In Dragon’s Dogma 2 with Max RT and no upscaling, the B580 ran at 44 FPS AVG with lows slightly lower than where they should be. The A770 leads the B580 in lows and ties in the average. 

AMD’s RX 7600 does better here than in Cyberpunk and Black Myth, up at 53 FPS AVG and outranking the B580 by 20%. The RTX 4060 also outdoes the B580 (and also outperforms the 7600’s frametime pacing), landing at 54 FPS AVG.

Battlemage is doing OK, but does not have the same advantage it has elsewhere.

Ray Tracing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 - 1440p

At 1440p and RT with Dragon’s Dogma 2, the B580 ran at 36 FPS AVG and had dips in lows compared to the neighboring prior-generation A-series GPUs. The 7600 leads the card now by about 10%, reducing its lead from at 1080p. The RTX 4060 is in a similar position, but with better lows.

Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk - 1080p Medium

Cyberpunk with Medium RT settings is less brutal on AMD than Ultra, something we showed in our last round of reviews, but remains one of the heaviest RT loads and disproportionately hard on AMD devices. This is tested without any upscaling.

The B580 did overall well here: Its average framerate was competitive with the RTX 3060 Ti, despite lower 0.1% lows than it. The 4060 struggles in this one with frametime pacing and is erratic and unpredictable with these settings. The B580 is a much better experience, with the 3060 Ti and up better still. The 4060 Ti also struggles with frametime consistency, illustrated by the 0.1% lows that draw our attention to the problem. This appears to be an issue with memory bandwidth, especially as contrasted to the 3060 Ti, which likely compounds with the VRAM capacity.

In a massive loss for AMD, the B580 runs 62% ahead of its RX 7600 in average framerate while also maintaining superior lows and frametime pacing. AMD’s closest card is the RX 7700 XT, which is significantly more expensive. This is a repeat of what we saw with the Alchemist cards last time, where the A770 and A750 alike outperformed AMD’s 6700 XT and 7600.

We tried testing RT Ultra for Cyberpunk, but unfortunately, the system hard locked with the B580 card. This behavior did not occur on any of the other 18 plus devices we tested with these settings and appears to be related to Battlemage.

Ray Tracing: Black Myth Wukong - 1080p (Experimental)

Black Myth: Wukong is up next. 

This is an experimental chart, which means we are still researching the performance and vetting it. Our confidence is lower in data for experimental charts, which means they should be weighted less; however, we publish them when we feel we are ready to begin sharing, as this allows us to continue learning and advancing. We just like to be clear in our disclosures of data confidence.

This one is brutal on anything that isn’t NVIDIA. Intel also had a last-minute driver update for RT performance in this game.

At 1080p and with FSR set to quality, using high raster settings and medium RT settings, the B580 ran at 34 FPS AVG, with lows where they should be. Intel’s last-minute driver change did nothing to our results -- they were nearly identical, so we’re just showing one set here. The B580 ranks alongside the RX 7800 XT (watch our review), as AMD has serious difficulties with this game. Wukong is similar in performance to Cyberpunk in its performance characteristics on AMD, where even a 4060 outperforms a 7900 XTX.

For Intel, it at least is doing better comparatively than AMD, but NVIDIA has a stranglehold here.

Frametime Consistency Inspection

We’ll move to some quick zoomed-in shots of the frametime charts for some good and bad scenarios for the B580.

Frametime Consistency: Baldur’s Gate 3 (4K)

We’ll start with Baldur’s Gate 3 at 4K. This chart shows the frame-to-frame interval on the vertical axis and the frame on the horizontal axis.

Lower is better, more consistent is best. Although the B580 is at times lower than the RTX 4060, the card experiences occasional but massive excursions from the previous frame. We’re seeing some jumps upwards of 20ms, which is noticeable, but not necessarily game-breaking -- it depends on the frequency of them. In this case, you’d notice. Arc has improved substantially from Alchemist in this specific regard, but it’s clear that Intel still has some work to do in at least Dx11 with this game.

Frametime Consistency: Dying Light 2 (1440p)

Dying Light 2 rasterized is one of the better scenarios for Arc, so we’ll balance by also looking at that as well.

In this one, the B580 had better frametimes across the entire bench pass. It’s lower overall, but also doesn’t experience any major unexpected deviations. Unlike the Baldur’s Gate chart, the B580 GPU is exceptionally consistent in its frametime pacing here. The 4060 ends up the worse of the two tested devices.

Frametime Consistency: Phantom Liberty RT (1080p)

In this next one, NVIDIA and its RTX 4060 are a victim of its own creation. In Cyberpunk with RT Medium, the RTX 4060’s framebuffer and memory bandwidth cause it to struggle, resulting in frametime spikes that, in one case in this chart, exceed 120ms. That’s 1/10th a second that you’re looking at the same frame. This massive spike would result in a stutter in-game. These stutters were repeatable during play. There’s another large spike later in the run. They also happen frequently in our later runs. 

The B580 did not exhibit this behavior in this test and would be a better experience. Intel’s memory choices benefit the company here; bandwidth is one of them but capacity also contributes.

Frametime Consistency: Starfield

Starfield had some major consistency issues run-to-run for Intel so we’re actually only showing Intel here.

This shows 2 test passes from Starfield at 1080p for the B580. In this one, you’re seeing wildly inconsistent frame pacing with a total range from 13ms to 53ms. There’s no pattern to it and frame delivery is overall erratic, making the experience less consistent and allowing more microstutter behaviors to emerge. Dying Light 2 looked much better for Battlemage.

Frametime Consistency: FFXIV 1440p

Final Fantasy 14 is next. In this one, B580 did well overall but had slightly reduced 0.1% lows versus the 3060 Ti and 6700 XT; however, it did better than the RTX 4060 across the board. In the frametime chart for Final Fantasy, we see an incredibly flat line with only one major spike that would hardly be noticeable since it isn’t repeating.

Let’s move on to efficiency.

Intel B580 Power Consumption & Efficiency (Experimental)

Now, we’re getting into power consumption and power efficiency measurements. For this testing, we’re using a PMD2 hooked into a PCIe slot interposer and the PCIe cables. This PMD2 has been personally calibrated by Elmor, from ElmorLabs, for our work upon request and has been validated against other measurement devices, including current clamps. We are isolating for just GPU power, eliminating other test bench power draw. This allows us a clean and isolated feed of GPU behavior.

We haven’t yet tested our full lineup of GPUs as this is all brand new testing, so we only have some of the most relevant cards. You’ll have to check back as we add more.

Power Consumption: Idle

This chart is for idle power draw on Windows desktop and without any GPU tasks active.

The Intel B580 pulled about 35W when idle at desktop, which is a lot less than the Alchemist GPUs pulled (up at 46W, 45W, and 43W), but it’s still more than everything else. Intel still has an idle power consumption challenge to overcome.

The RX 6600 (watch our review), for example, pulled only 5W through the PCIe slot and PCIe cables when idle, which is impressive. The 6600 XT was similar, at 6.2W. The 4060 is a relevant comparison and far lower in power consumption idle, down at 11W to the B580’s 35W or so.

This is an area Intel will eventually need to improve, but no one will care about its idle power draw if the performance isn’t good enough to warrant a purchase first, so we’ll see if this improves subsequently.

Idle GPU power has been requested by our audience for years, so we’re happy to finally start delivering it with this first look.

Efficiency: Baldur’s Gate 3 (1440p)

The next chart is for Baldur’s Gate 3 efficiency at 1440p, looking at rasterization performance. This is measured in FPS/W, which can be thought of as frames per joule since it’s just frames per second per joules per second. Higher is more efficient here.

FPS/W is easier to understand for most people. In this test, the RTX 4060 Ti has the best FPS/W performance, up at 0.71. The 4060 Ti is about 37% more efficient, meaning its FPS/W score is 37% higher than the Intel B580. This is still a massive generational improvement for Intel, where its A580 previously was way down at 0.31. The B580 scores 68% higher in FPS/W than the A580 and A750. Its total power draw is about 141W here, the same as the 4060 Ti, and so the reason its FPS/W is lower is because its framerate is simply lower. 

The 4060 pulls 126W in this test and has a slightly higher framerate, benefiting on both sides of the equation. We don’t yet have the RX 7600 in this lineup.

Efficiency: FFXIV (1440p)

Now we’ll look at one of the B580’s best case scenarios to balance the last two.

This chart is for Final Fantasy 14 at 1440p, where it did well. The B580 ends up 4th on our list so far at 0.51 FPS/W, ahead of the 7800 XT and behind the 4060.

The RTX 4060 pulled 124W here, putting it at 0.58 FPS/W and almost 14% more efficient than the B580. That’s a good spot for the B580, despite being less efficient and pulling more power at 170W.

The 4060 Ti pulled just 129W, so it didn’t leverage its total power budget, and was 27% more efficient than the B580.

Against the last generation, the B580 is significantly more efficient than the RX 6600 XT, RX 6600, RTX 3060 Ti, and Intel’s own Arc cards. The jump over the A750 is huge, especially since the Titan model has a boosted power budget.

Efficiency: FFXIV (1080p)

At 1080p, the 4090 and 4060 Ti appear the same because the 4090 (watch our review) is completely CPU-bound. It can’t perform any better, but remains in a higher power draw state.

The B580 again ranks as less efficient than the 4060 and more efficient than the 7800 XT and below. The B580 pulled 161W here.

Efficiency: Black Myth Wukong (1080p)

In Black Myth: Wukong at 1080p and without ray tracing, the B580 scored 0.3 FPS/W and pulled 146W, which has it significantly behind the RTX 4060 at 0.4 FPS/W and 121W. The 4090 would rank higher if it could fully stretch its legs.

The B580 is about equal to the 7800 XT again.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty (RT, 1080p)

In Phantom Liberty with Ray Tracing and at 1080p, the B580 manages to hold onto its 4th place positioning in our current limited lineup. The lead over the 7800 XT is now a massive 29%, thanks to AMD’s performance issues in this title. The 4060 maintains an advantage of 15% over the B580. What’s clear is that Intel has drastically improved on its A-series performance.

Intel B580 Conclusion

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Intel Battlemage is way better than our experiences with Alchemist. The launch of the A380 and subsequent A750 and A770 cards was plagued with experience-ruining bugs that were unfixable in many cases. This time around, we ran into a couple driver issues, but the only one that completely prevented play was an issue with Cyberpunk and RT Ultra settings, where it’d hard crash. Everything else ran more or less without issue.

This review is long already, so we’ll keep it simple. Here are the key points:

• We observed that the B580 scales well as resolution increases, especially at 4K and the games that aren’t heavy enough to eliminate it as an option. Unfortunately, the card isn’t so powerful that 4K is playable in a lot of these games, but the behavior was consistent with 1440p as well. 1080p saw a loss of advantage or sometimes a flip with the RTX 4060 or RX 7600.
• Intel’s frametimes are overall much better and mostly avoid experience-ruining issues in almost all cases. The Battlemage drivers still have some frametime pacing problems in some games and tests and are not overall superior, but have improved enough that, in combination with a low enough price point at $250 and below, they could be overlooked depending on the games you play.
• Also as a downside, Intel’s idle power consumption remains high. It has improved massively, but is higher than everyone else at idle for the most part.
• Intel’s efficiency in actual gaming scenarios, at least when those games perform well for it, has improved massively and is competitive with the RX 7800 XT and RTX 4060 in some scenarios.

As the A750 went on massive fire sales previously, we’d sometimes recommend it with heavy caveating. The main one was that we never felt comfortable recommending it for the general mainstream audience as we feared users without troubleshooting experience (or even those who have it, but don’t have secondary GPUs) would find it frustrating when encountering games that simply don’t work. Starfield, for example, just didn’t work at launch on Arc. 

Battlemage has improved on this front. We feel much more comfortable recommending at large. However, we still have one major caveat, which is that this is still only the second true generation of Intel’s modern dGPUs. We fully anticipate that Battlemage will have issues given the thousands of games and millions of hardware and software combinations, and we can’t possibly vet them all. That’s why it’s important to check other reviews. We can only speak for our experiences: In the games we tested and with our software, we encountered only one game-breaking bug, and that was RT Ultra in Cyberpunk, which is likely not particularly playable anyway. It is a valid issue, though. We also had one system hard reset at some point.

Now, on NVIDIA and AMD, such issues would almost never happen at this point. On Intel, this is an improvement from dozens of problems with the Alchemist launch. The issues were so many that we published a bug report detailing over 30 major problems. 

The B580 poses considerable value as compared to the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. It is not always the best and trades with these cards, but is a serious competitor. You have all the numbers. We’d recommend looking through our results and determining if it’s a good fit for your games, but overall, Intel’s improvement is obvious.

The next big thing will be seeing what happens in January with Intel’s competitors.

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Montech King 65 Pro Case Review & Benchmarks: Cable Management, Thermals, Noisejimmy_thang December 3, 2024

We review the Montech King 65 Pro’s build quality, value, design, thermals, and more

The Highlights

• The Montech King 65 Pro shares tooling with the Montech King 95 Pro case before it
• The King 65 Pro is not a great thermal performer
• The actual core of the chassis is good overall
• Original MSRP: $100
• Release Date: October 14, 2024

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

Today we’re reviewing the new $100 Montech King 65 Pro. The coolest feature of the case is its side-mount fan tray, which can be released with two screws and pivoted out for easy cable routing or fan and radiator installation. It’s well-designed so that the tray is loosely secured by the cable grommets, which use their chamfered edges to guide it into place in a way that almost feels like there’s a guide wheel.

This dual-chamber case comes with 3 pre-installed fans: 2x 140mm reverse blade ARGB side fans and 1x 120mm ARGB rear fan. Looking around the case, we can find remnants of the King 95. That’s because a lot of this case is the same, but cheaper.

Editor's note: This was originally published on October 14, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Test Lead, Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Testing

Mike Gaglione

Camera, Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Camera

Tim Phetdara
Andrew Coleman

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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But for those of you who have used the King 95, a lot of this case will be familiar: It’s intended to be a cheaper variation of the theme. There are some paneling changes, like the top panel, but a lot of the interior is familiar. 

Because we never formally reviewed the King 95 as it was during our case benchmarking rework, we’ll treat this as the first look at both the 95 and 65 features and review it fully. Since there’s shared tooling, some of the discussion will apply to both.

Let’s get into the review.

Pricing & Alternatives

We’ll start with the competitors in this price range.

Currently, the King 95 Pro is $140 to $150, including its 6x ARGB fans. The non-Pro variant is the same case, but drops to 0 included fans and is currently around $110. At $100, the King 65 Pro swaps some panels but adds 3 fans back. 

Somewhat confusingly, we found Montech’s own King 95 on Newegg for $90 at the time of writing this. They’re calling this a “holiday sale” -- it’s October 10th as we write this and we have absolutely no idea what holiday that is for, maybe “Newegg Needs Money Day,” but the point is that $90 makes it cheaper than the brand new King 65 Pro and may lead to some product cannibalism. Adding 3 fans wouldn’t be that expensive.

In price and ignoring form factor, the King 65 Pro competes with the Lian Li Lancool 207, the $80 case we just reviewed. The Lancool case is a more traditional design, while this is a dual-chamber fishtank, so they have different looks. Lian Li’s Lancool is an excellent thermal performer with some cable management challenges.

The SilverStone 514X is another case around $100 that the King 65 competes with on price, but is totally different on style.

The Phanteks XT Pro Ultra is $80 and comes with 4x 140mm fans in a standard form factor case as well.

As for actual style competition, the Lian Li Vision is currently $130 to $140 and doesn’t include fans, but would match for the general design.

Montech King 95 & King 65 Differences

The King 65 Pro adds a bolted-on front plastic piece to square out the front/bottom of the case. This is in contrast to the curved design of the King 95. 

Aside from the glass, the top panel also features curved edges as compared to the King 65’s straighter-edge design. The King 65’s top and back side panel also features a more standard mesh ventilation as compared to the King 95’s Hyte-inspired sweeping design. The King 95’s ventilated side panel also features a built-in dust filter, whereas the King 95’s solution does not. 

There are also differences between the fan hubs of both cases. The King 65 features 6 total connections whereas the King 95 Pro has 10 total ports. 

Another difference includes the fact that there are rubber grommets within the King 95 Pro, which are absent from the King 65 Pro. 

Montech King 65 Pro Build Quality & Panels

Those are the key differences. Now we’ll get into build quality and panels of the King 65. A lot of this discussion will also apply to the King 95.

Overall, panel construction quality is good on the King 65, but there are some caveats.

At Computex, we noticed that the front panel was very slightly misaligned with the decorative plate for the I/O side. This is somewhat of a nitpick, but that’s because it’s rarely an issue. 

The cases that we got resolve this issue and have the two front panels level, so that was nice to see. 

The front decorative strip is actually just plastic with a brushed look to sort of fake an aluminum appearance, serving as a cheaper gimmick to emulate the O11D and 6500D (read our review) look.

As a downside, the top metal strip for the supporting backing of the glass front panel was bent up on our black King 65 Pro. We always include damage in our reviews, whether that’s quality control or shipping. This particular damage looks like something that happened at the factory, not in shipping. It could be easily pressed back down with a flat edge.

As a positive, the panel gap between the front and side panel is flush, which wasn’t the case with the show model we saw 5 months ago. Cheaper cases often have problems with panel alignment.

The side panels are secured with thumbscrews, which we always like to see just as a security feature when moving the computer around for cleaning and maintenance. The front panel pops out easily once the side panel is removed.

Like we saw on the Lancool 207, the King 65 uses a reinforced rectangular piece of steel to support the snaps to the frame.

The front corner of the top panel is also relatively strong, unlike the Tryx case, because Montech designed it properly. The Tryx case top panel was caving in not from shipping damage, but from design issues, and we want to make sure that plot doesn’t get twisted because it’s important. The King 65 is relatively stout, which helps reduce the top panel length to provide strength, and is also supported by a more significant anchor to the deeper secondary channel, meaning a lengthier attachment point to serve as a counter support on that front edge.

The top panel itself is of sturdy build and has butted-together steel around the edges to give clearance from the fan rails while adding structural rigidity, but lacks the mesh we saw in the King 95. 

The final side panel is a little floppy from lack of thicker supports, but has no functional downside. It’s also ventilated for air intake through the side. 

Removing that panel, there’s a cable management cover tray with 2x 2.5” SSD mounts in it. Two screws can be removed to hinge the door outward, giving access to the drive mounts and two additional fan mounts with rails in the door. And this is where we get into an area that Montech could improve.

Both sets of fan mounts have heavy obstructions. By accommodating both 120mm and 140mm sizes, Montech needs two sets of mounting points. Unfortunately, in the process of creating these, it has covered up to about 20mm per side of the fan blade, or 40mm total horizontally obstructed. This is a huge amount of intake area loss. Montech could still support two sets of rails, but at least cutting a hole right in the middle would be better -- or even running the rails the entire length of the fan so that there’s some room for air. This is an oversight that likewise extends to the King 95. The King 95 Pro did OK in most of our tests, but falls behind other cases with similar fan count. This is a large contributor to that.

Montech King 65 Pro Cable Management

For cable management, the King 65 continues the trend of including velcro cable ties that secure behind the motherboard tray, which itself is already deep enough to provide functionally limitless cable space. Although we’ve since built in the cases, we liked how the fans were pre-routed and arranged out of the box.

The power supply sits elevated atop a rubber-damped pad, providing clearance on all sides while hopefully absorbing vibration that could cause noise. Although the exterior of the hard drive cage has rubber dampers, the drive sleds themselves do not. If supporting 3.5” drives, we’d like to see rubber dampers at the contact points where the drive meets the plastic or metal. 

Access is through the rear for drive installation, which mostly makes things easier. They aren’t hot-swap cages with pre-wired backplanes or anything fancy like that, but the rear access does make things easy to get to.

As for radiator, GPU, and fan support, it’s the same as the King 95 Pro: Montech’s GPU support is up to 420mm long, so basically any video card, and radiator support is up to 280mm or 360mm top, 140 or 240mm side, and 175mm tall air coolers.

Montech King 65 Pro Thermal Benchmarks

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CPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

We’ll start with noise-normalized CPU thermals under a full torture workload.

Unfortunately for the King 65 Pro, it’s the new worst result on the charts. These fans just aren’t powerful enough to provide the cooling necessary, and likewise, extra noise created by paneling choices, such as the sharper angles and the obstructions, leads to a need to reduce speed to normalize for noise.

The King 65 Pro lands at 57.6 degrees over ambient for average P-core temperature, putting it behind even the Hyte Y60 (watch our review) in the baseline setup.

The Antec C8 runs about 3 degrees cooler, which is significant, although it carries a $50 premium. The same-priced Silverstone 514X (read our review) runs about 6 degrees cooler with its own stock fans. The Flux Pro (read our review) does well here, but costs $80 more than the King 65 Pro, so it’s not a fair comparison. We know, that’s hard to believe since they’re both pros.

The Lancool 207 is $20 cheaper than the King 65 Pro though and manages to completely dominate it on this chart. At 44.5 degrees, it’s not even close. The King 65 Pro is just not a great thermal performer.

The King 95 Pro with the glass front ran at 50 degrees over ambient, which is over a 7 degree reduction without even using mesh. That’s a lot of impact from the extra fans and panel changes.

GPU Thermals: Noise-Normalized

Here are the GPU thermals for the same noise-normalized test.

The King 65 Pro gets destroyed here. It is not only at the absolute bottom of the chart, but it’s several degrees worse than the previous worst: The FARA 515XR set the floor at 54 degrees over ambient previously, with the King 65 Pro at 57 degrees over ambient. For GPU testing, that’s a big swing. The GPU is not normally as sensitive to the case changes as the CPU in our tests.

The $150 Antec C8 (read our review) is an impressive 15 degrees better than the King 65 Pro. The $80 Lancool 207 is also about 15-16 degrees better than the $100 King 65 Pro.

Standardized Fans: CPU Thermals

The next test is where we pull all the included fans and swap them for 3 standardized fans. Some cases are worsened by this, as we’re removing more abundant or better fans; however, this is useful for evaluating changes to the chassis structure itself. 

As a perfect example: The King 95 and King 65 are suddenly exact equals when we swap to the same fans and positions. They’re within 0.4 degrees of each other for P-core average performance, which is impressive. That’s a testament to our new methodology and is great to see.

The Antec C8 with comparable side intake lands at 46 degrees, outperforming the King 65 and King 95 alike. Because we’ve normalized to the same fans and in the same positions, we can confidently state that the King 65 and King 95 have paneling that obstructs the fans enough to worsen performance. Montech could boost itself by changing its porosity and all the small obstructions to airflow that add up, like those earlier rails we discussed.

Standardized Fans: GPU Thermals

GPU thermals when using standardized fans are also within roughly 1-degree ranges between the King 95 and King 65. The curvature of the glass theoretically should help improve air access to the GPU, but this gets into areas where we’d need CFD to know for certain. Regardless, at about 1-degree difference, they’re functionally the same.

The Antec C8 with side intake again climbs ahead, up at 42 degrees for GPU temperature against 44.6 on the King 65.

CPU Thermals: Full Speed

Back to the included stock fans and at 100% fan speeds, the King 65 Pro landed at 37.8 dBA as tested in our hemi-anechoic chamber, aligning it most comparably with the Antec C8 ARGB, which was 37.11dBA. That’s the same noise level.

The C8 outperforms the King 65 even with both at full fan speed, at 49 degrees to 54 for the average P-core temperature. The cheaper FARA 514X is quieter than both, at an impressive 35 dBA and 47 degrees over ambient. The Lancool 207 sounds more like a vacuum cleaner at 41.6 dBA when running at full speeds, but pushes to 41.6 degrees over ambient.

VRM Thermals: Noise-Normalized

Noise-normalized VRM and RAM thermals position the King 65 Pro at 36 degrees for the VRM and 26 for the RAM. These results have it toward the bottom of the chart, though better than the Hyte Y60 with its stock configuration. Both the VRM and RAM thermals are completely acceptable, it’s just that it isn’t as competitive.

Montech King 65 Pro Conclusion

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Thermally, the Montech King 65 Pro is just not impressive. It can’t overcome the limitation it has on its panel and case design. Its 3 moderate fans are just not sufficient for it to get anywhere impressive on our thermal charts and it’s at the bottom of some of those charts.

In terms of build quality, in some places, it’s pretty good. The actual core of the chassis is good overall. There’s a lot of space to work with the cabling. There’s also some cool features like the side-mount fan tray, which is also on the King 95 Pro. Overall, the build and panel quality are fine. It’s just that at $100, it has to be really competitive and one of the things it's competing against is the King 95 Pro without any included fans. 

This makes it hard to recommend the case in any one category. Overall, the King 65 Pro is okay. We don’t hate it, but against standard form factor cases like the Lancool 207 or even the FARA 514X, which we weren’t thrilled about but we thought was fine, those are better options at this price. They are also better thermal performers, though the King 65 Pro is certainly a lot easier to build in than the 207. 

In terms of other competition, the Antec C8 is similar in design to the King 65 Pro, but it’s wider and its non ARGB variant without fans is similarly priced.

Within $20 plus or minus of the King 65 Pro, the case kind of gets its ass kicked in either direction thermally.

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Best PC Cases of 2024: $80 to $800 Airflow, Cable Management, & Thermal Leadersjimmy_thang November 27, 2024

Our best cases round-up is back! We're looking at the best gaming PC cases for 2024, ranging from $80 to $800 and covering all aspects of custom PC building.

The Highlights

• Best Overall Case 2024: Fractal North & North XL
• Best Mechanical Design Case: HAVN HS 420
• Best Sub-$100 Case: Lian Li Lancool 207
• Best Mid-Range Case: Antec C8 ARGB
• Best Noise-Normalized Case Thermals: Antec Flux Pro

Table of Contents

• AutoTOC

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Intro

We’re looking at the best cases available right now. 

We broke back into case reviews this year and have added to our case collection. This round-up highlights the best cases we think are available in 2024 based on our thermal benchmarks, acoustic tests, build quality evaluation, and cable management testing.

This year was packed with excellent cases -- but of course, a few that were really problematic as well.

Editor's note: This was originally published on November 21, 2024 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.

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Credits

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Host, Writing

Steve Burke

Writing

Patrick Lathan

Video Editing

Vitalii Makhnovets

Writing, Web Editing

Jimmy Thang

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Setting Expectations

Welcome back to the Best Of Round-Up series. These are our favorite pieces to run annually and help you quickly get back into PC components if you haven’t been paying attention, but also give us a reason to go back through all the cases we’ve tested recently and remember what was the best. 

These are meant to be more of a fly-over story in the round-up series to help simplify and highlight the key points. If you want the full in-depth reviews with all the nuance, check the links in the description below. We’ve linked each case review and have also provided all the usual affiliate links with them.

We already published Best CPUs and the same thing applies here: Sometimes, the best case or CPU in 2024 might be something that launched in a previous year. We look at the total market and what the best options are now, not just what launched this year. As a reminder as well, we took about a year off of case reviews in 2023, so we launched back into it heavy this year and we’re excited to be back to the Best Of series for something positive.

Let’s get into it.

Overview: Best PC Cases for 2024

Category	Case	Review
Best Overall Case 2024	Fractal North on Amazon on Newegg Fractal North XL on Amazon on Newegg	Excellent Design: Fractal North Case Review & Benchmarks Fractal North XL Case Review & Benchmarks: Wood Panels & Mesh
Best Mechanical Design	HAVN HS 420 on Amazon	A New Type of Computer Case | HAVN HS 420 Thermal Benchmarks & Review
Best Sub-$100 Case	Lian Li Lancool 207 on Amazon on Newegg	Lian Li Lancool 207 Airflow Case Review | Cable Management, Build Quality, & Benchmarks
Best Mid-Range Case	Antec C8 ARGB on Amazon on Newegg	Surprisingly Good: Antec C8 ARGB Case Review, Thermals, Cable Management, & Noise
Best Out-of-the-Box Case Thermals	Lian Li Lancool 207 on Amazon on Newegg Antec Flux Pro on Amazon on Newegg	Lian Li Lancool 207 Airflow Case Review | Cable Management, Build Quality, & Benchmarks Best Case of 2024 So Far: Antec Flux Pro Review & Benchmarks
Best Noise-Normalized Case Thermals	Antec Flux Pro on Amazon on Newegg	Best Case of 2024 So Far: Antec Flux Pro Review & Benchmarks
Most Innovative Case	Meshless AIO	A Better Computer Fan - Sometimes: Cross-Flow Meshless AIO Case Benchmarks & Review
Biggest Disappointment Case	Corsair 6500 Series on Amazon on Newegg	Corsair Forgot How to Make a Case: 6500D Airflow & 6500X Review

Best Overall Case 2024: Fractal North & North XL

Fractal North: Original review | Newegg | Amazon

Fractal North XL: Original review | Newegg | Amazon

Awarding the best overall case is difficult this year, which is a good problem to have -- that means cases don’t suck. This category requires a strong offering on all fronts: Value, thermal performance, acoustic performance, aesthetics, build quality, ease-of-installation features, and cable management.

We’re giving it to the Fractal North & North XL. Although other cases are superior in some individual situations, like the Antec Flux Pro (by a slim margin) in thermals or the HAVN HS 420 in mechanical aspects, the North and North XL are masterful executions of a standard computer case.

This is bolstered by prices that have been lower in recent weeks, typically down around $125 to $140 for the North (watch our review).

The Fractal North was the first case to successfully kick-off the wooden trend at scale, with everyone else in the industry scrambling to follow. InWin gets credit for initially attempting this years ago, but it failed to find a way to bring it to market and execute. Fractal pulled it all together and cleaned up the idea.

The North comes with either a glass or mesh side panel, which includes options for additional side mounts to further boost cooling performance. Actually, in our recent tour of Wendell’s offices, you can see such a configuration for one of his machines.

Fractal’s fan support on the XL is also effectively whatever you want it to be: The company cleverly uses standard hole spacing for its rear ventilation (and even PCIe slot covers and top of the power supply shroud) so that you could mount a fan basically anywhere you want in the case. The cooling options are really opened up because of this. 

Ease-of-installation options are also great: Because the top panel so easily slides off to remove, and because Fractal doesn’t put a ton of other metal in the way, you can get clear access through the top of the case for builds. The extra width in the XL also makes larger radiators easier to work with up top, reducing board clearance issues.

The North XL (read our review) is what we prefer to the North, mostly for its increased size for easier building and for our style of build, but both are good takes on the theme. Visually, the wood look doesn’t look like the slapped-on Vinyl style we see in other cases. It looks more purposeful. Fractal also does great work mixing different tone wood coloring with different panel coloring, including matching the black case with gold accents and the white case with silver accents.

And finally, even in cooling performance, the North XL is routinely at the top of the charts for thermal benchmarks. It’s not the best -- that’ll go to two other cases this year -- but it’s regularly at the top, and that plus all the other features, plus the value, get the North cases the Best Overall award.

Best Mechanical Design: HAVN HS 420

Original review | Amazon

Runner-Up: SilverStone Alta D1

Original preview | Amazon

The next award is for the Best Mechanical Design, which we give to cases that may not have won in other categories, but truly innovated for the physical and mechanical elements of the case.

This year, it goes to newcomer HAVN and their HS 420. The HS 420 (read our review) exhibits a mastery of mechanical features.

The HS 420 doesn't include fans, it's not fully airflow-focused, and it isn't cheap at $200 for the horizontal GPU model. That makes it a tough fit for our price- and performance-focused award categories, but it needs to be recognized, because it's one of the most interesting and downright good cases that we've reviewed this year.

Mechanically, it’s excellent. The curved tempered glass panel is the most significant feature. The panel is installed by sliding it back and down into the case on plastic wheels, where it then comes to rest on the bottom edge of the chassis. It takes some getting used to, but it's a clever and secure way of getting the huge glass pane seated. It's also proven to be durable, surviving multiple build/unbuild cycles through the filming process without serious wear.

There was a lot of thought put into airflow, something we illustrated in animations. The HS 420 VGPU includes a curved glass deflector that's intended to direct incoming air around and into vertically-mounted GPUs. It was a clever idea and a fresh approach, which we appreciated, but it did not help performance in our test system. That’s also why we're specifically giving the award to the $200 base model, which is cheaper and sheds the hardware that didn’t do much. 

Even with the base model, though, HAVN planned for an unusual airflow pattern with intake at the bottom of the rear panel and exhaust at the top of the same panel, and included 120mm plates on each mount that are isolated with rubber vibration damping. In fact, every fan tray is padded with rubber, including the side mount that doubles as drive storage. The drive storage alone is pretty cool. It creates a spine-like structure that can be removed for more fans.

The case's construction is clever and precise in areas like the tightly-spaced storage bays at the front and the rounded edges of the PSU shroud and motherboard tray. The simple GPU support that ships with the non-VGPU case variant is one of the sturdiest we've seen, cast from solid metal and braced against the PSU shroud. The cable channels are not only labeled, but color-coded in what is an excellent feature, as it helps new builders understand where to route cables.

There are a ton of other small attention-to-detail elements, like the fact that HAVN matched the structural reinforcement for the panels to align with fan hubs, or the dead zone, rather than obstructing air intake. You can check our review for all the other details, including our full charts with 7 or 8 different fan configurations.

Before closing out this category, we want to give some recognition to SilverStone's ALTA D1. The ALTA D1 is an $800 halo product that's finally hit retail following our first encounter with it at Computex 2023 and again at Computex 2024. The price is ridiculous and very few people will buy the case, but the mechanical design hopefully inspires some more affordable cases: It has modular bays on rails everywhere, including 5.25" drive support, socketable radiators, a slide-out motherboard tray, SSI-EEB support, 11 expansion slots, large fan mounts, repositionable power supplies, and a true home server setup. It's beyond what we could recommend in a serious review if only for the price, but we may come up with a fun project for the ALTA D1 in the future and we respect its mechanical design.

Best Sub-$100 Case: Lian Li Lancool 207

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

We’ve had a category for years for the “Best Budget Case,” but the amount of quality cases in the $60 price point and under has really declined in recent years. Honestly, at or below $60 right now, we think used cases are typically a far better deal than something new at the same price.

So this category has become Best Sub-$100 case, which we’re giving to the Lian Li Lancool 207. 

There were a lot of cases to consider for this category: When we were deciding this year's winners, although there are a lot of sub-$100 cases, there just aren’t any that defeat the Lian Li Lancool 207 (read our review). In the current market, $80 is dirt cheap for a name-brand case: there are cheaper cases available from companies like SAMA and DIYPC, but we're confident that none of them come close to the Lancool 207's frequently chart-topping thermal performance.

When we reviewed the SilverStone 515XR, we were aware that SilverStone had pulled out all the stops to offer a case with four fans at $68, but the performance gap between it and the 207 is massive. There’s also differences in quality-of-life features. 

The same goes for the Phanteks XT Pro Ultra and the Montech XR. Both cases have been added to our charts recently. The Montech XR is supposed to be closer to $60, but has been out of stock lately and often more expensive when it is available.

The Lancool 207 is a solidly-built case with sturdy toolless panels, which is unusual at this price point. The most unusual aspect, though, is at the bottom of the case, where two 120mm intake fans are positioned directly underneath the GPU, while the PSU is mounted at the front with an extension cord. The shroud is ventilated on both sides as well as the rear in order to provide an airflow path for the bottom intake fans (although adding drives and cables to the case reduces that ventilation, but the ample intake through the rear counters this). In addition to the two bottom intake fans, 2x 140mm ARGB front intake fans are included with the case. 

They may not sound significant individually, but the fact that the 207 has a full suite of basic quality of life features like reusable (and bridgeless) expansion slot covers, rubber grommets for cable cutouts, a USB Type-C port, ARGB fans, built-in velcro straps, and toolless panels is impressive in combination with its price and thermal performance. It's rare to see that full combo in a case, especially one which is also a top thermal performer. The fact that the 207 also wins our objective, numbers-based Best Thermals category is also part of why it lands here.

We have two big issues with the 207: first, the toolless side panel won't stay on without meticulous cable management. There's no way around this, but sticking to flat cables and minimizing the number of cables used will help. There's also room to improve PSU cooling in the case, as most PSUs will be oriented fan-side-down with barely any clearance above the table surface. The cable management is the one to be aware of. You can watch our review for more on that.

Still, at $80, Lian Li is being brutally competitive.

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Best Mid-Range Case: Antec C8 ARGB

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

Next up is the award for the Best Mid-Range case. We’re looking for something that isn’t too wild or out there. We want relatively standard, but a good price-to-performance and overall build quality. We’re also looking for something a little bit better than the budget case. For this, we’re giving it to the Antec C8 ARGB.

Antec has had a strong year. It had 2 showings this year in our list we have today, but it was the Antec C8 that first signaled to us that the company was worth paying attention to again after a decade of fading into irrelevance. 

MSRP is $150 for the ARGB variant with fans included, but it's been long enough since the case's June launch that we're beginning to see discounts. The fan-less variant is regularly available with promo codes around $100. 

This mid-range award category gives us some room to consider quality of life and aesthetic features, not just raw performance-per-dollar, and the C8 is well-balanced in those categories.

The C8's dual chamber layout isn’t new, but Antec impressed us with the level of care that it put into details like molding text into the fan frames, color-matching all the components in the white SKU, and the accessory kit. Small touches, even ones that aren't functional, add up to create a product that feels worth the price. The C8's appearance reminds us of the clean designs that made Corsair's 4000D Airflow (and 5000D, and 7000D, et cetera) so appealing, but we much prefer Antec's case to the directly comparable Corsair 6500D Airflow.

Functionally, the usual benefits of dual-chamber design apply: there's plenty of space to work with in both chambers, including storage space for cables and drives. Dual chamber cases frequently have cable channels so deep that it's difficult to reach tie points at the bottom and effectively bundle cables, but the C8's removable "air duct partition" solves that problem.

The centerpiece of the C8 ARGB (read our review) is the bottom fan mount, containing two unusual 160mm x 35mm reverse-blade intake fans (with an additional conventional 140mm exhaust fan at the rear of the case). These two 160mm fans are placed over a completely open vent, meaning that the removable bottom filter is the only obstruction to incoming air. Antec was aware enough to not obstruct this intake path, unlike many other companies. 

This makes GPU cooling in the C8 ARGB excellent, although CPU cooling with our test setup was predictably lackluster due to the lack of front or side intake.

We prefer the C8 ARGB to the fanless base model, but the less expensive SKU may make more sense for liquid-cooled builds since the ARGB's 160mm stock fans won't match any normal radiator. The case can fit up to 3x 360mm radiators simultaneously, most easily in the side and bottom slots. For air cooled builds, the $20 upcharge for the ARGB variant with the extra fans is worth it. Many of the dual-chamber cases we've reviewed have followed in the footsteps of the O11 Dynamic by not including any stock fans, so having a choice is a welcome change.

Best Out-of-the-Box Case Thermals (Lian Li Lancool 207, Antec Flux Pro)

Lian Li Lancool 207 original review | Newegg | Amazon

Antec Flux Pro original review | Newegg | Amazon

Our next two awards are for thermals. The next one is for Best Noise-Normalized Thermals, while this one is for Best Out-of-the-Box Thermals. The difference is that noise-normalized is focused on one category, whereas Best Thermals looks for the best performer in all tests we ran and at all fan speeds.

The raw all-fans-maxed stock performance is a tie between the Lian Li Lancool 207, represented in the sub $100 category, and Antec Flux Pro, which is represented in the next category. These cases have similar layouts, each with front intake fans behind a mesh panel and bottom intake fans mounted on top of a ventilated PSU shroud. Our test bench hardware uses air cooling with a flow-through GPU cooler and a CPU tower cooler, which we've chosen to be as broadly representative as possible and as controllable as possible. This hardware benefits from simple, direct airflow: cool air from the front for the CPU, cool air from the bottom for the GPU. These two cases are the ideal realization of that airflow pattern.

The Flux Pro and Lancool 207 both averaged 38 degrees Celsius above ambient all-core and 42 degrees on just the P-cores. Fractal's Torrent and North XL are both within one degree of this result, but the Flux Pro (read our review) and 207 pull slightly ahead in other categories.

Moving to GPU thermals, both the Flux Pro and the Lancool 207 averaged exactly 38.2 degrees above ambient, although the 207's memory temperature averaged slightly better at 41 degrees versus 43, while the Flux Pro's hotspot temperature was a little lower. The Flux Pro's stock configuration is set up to mount the PSU rotated 90 degrees in Antec's "iShift" mount, but we found that mounting the PSU in a more typical orientation with the plug at the rear of the case slightly lowered overall GPU temperatures for a best-case 37 degree delta above ambient.

The 207, on the other hand, logged our best temperatures so far from the VRM and RAM sensors at 21 and 17 degrees above ambient respectively. These two cases are extremely close in performance, and we can't declare just one winner between the two of them.

Best Noise-Normalized Case Thermals: Antec Flux Pro

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

The next award is for Best Noise-Normalized Thermals. This is a pure performance-driven category, but it combines 2 metrics, which is acoustics and thermals. Fortunately, its winner is also just a good standard case to build in: The Antec Flux Pro.

Noise-normalized thermal tests are the most important performance benchmarks we run on cases. With the current iteration of our bench, we place the case on a table in our hemi-anechoic chamber with a mic pointed directly at the center of the front panel from one meter away. Then, we lower the speed of the case's stock fans in tandem until we hit our chosen threshold of 27 dBA SPL. This allows us to level the playing field so that the cases with the loudest fans don't automatically land at the top of every single chart by brute force. It creates a control.

The Flux Pro's front panel doesn't block much noise, but it's so well-ventilated that the three 140mm front intake fans don't need to work hard and don’t generate much noise to begin with. There isn’t much resistance and so they can spin slower, while the 2x 120mm shroud-top fans assist GPU cooling. The Flux Pro's PSU shroud is open on all sides, including the bottom, which maximizes airflow without directing significantly more noise towards our mic.

CPU thermals are tied at the top of the chart with the Lancool 207 at 41 degrees Celsius above ambient all-core and 45 degrees on just the P-cores. Some of our other high-performing cases like the North XL and Torrent come close, and the Lian Li Lancool 216 (watch our review) is tied in this one, but the Flux Pro is the best overall when taking all results into account. 

In the noise-normalized GPU thermal test, it outperforms the Lancool 207 and ties the Torrent (watch our review) for GPU die temperature. 

In VRM and DDR5 memory thermals, the Flux Pro is the chart leader by a technicality, but again is functionally tied with the 207. Both the Flux Pro and 207 offer excellent cooling at the noise levels, but the Flux Pro technically takes more lead spots than the 207. But the 207 is well-represented already.

We also know from our full speed results that it's possible that the Flux Pro could perform even better with its PSU mounted in the typical orientation rather than the stock rotated iShift mount.

The Flux Pro was an excellent return to form for Antec and offers a standard layout case for strong fundamentals. It is deserving of the Noise-Normalized victory while still offering the basics and foundation required for a good standard PC build in a non dual chamber case.

Most Innovative Case: Meshless AIO

Original review 

Honorable Mention: InWin Dubili

Newegg | Amazon

Our Most Innovative Case award goes to the case that has the newest and most different design, even if it doesn't work perfectly, because innovation pushes this industry forward. This goes to the Meshless AIO Mini-ITX case.

Despite its generic, boxy exterior, the Meshless AIO (read our review) is one of the most innovative cases we've ever reviewed.

The Meshless AIO (now apparently listed with a formal launch name as the “MD280”) is built around a cylindrical crossflow fan, like a smaller version of the fan in a mini-split wall unit. We found the case design curious enough that we built this 3D animation to help explain and educate on how these work. The basics are that the crossflow fan shoots hot air out at the upper edge of the side panel, and theoretically pulls cool air in everywhere else: towards the GPU fans from the side panel, through the radiator, and over the motherboard and PSU from a tiny strip of ventilation along the bottom edge of the case. In practice, we found that the GPU was better cooled by taping a couple of normal 120mm case fans to the top of the case, but these had other downsides in other tests. 

Thermal performance was at least adequate, and considering there was a single fan handling everything, overall impressive for what was done on a single fan that you might not normally find in a PC case. We were concerned about the PSU's lack of direct access to cool air, but otherwise, everything was getting fed air.

There are some other creative aspects to the MD280’s construction outside of the fan: the main portion of the case is a single piece of extruded aluminum, and other elements like the fan, radiator, glass side panel, and handle slide into the open ends. This is an excellent and compact design that works well. Another cool feature is the lever that’s accessible from the rear of the case, working to slide the PCIe riser cable up and down. It presses the slot into place to improve accessibility. It's an ambitious and creative project, especially since Meshless Design informed us that it's an independent outfit driven by one man: Hank Lin. This is the work of an engineer who turned an idea into an actual product with overall good execution.

We need to issue a buyer beware warning here: it looks like the Meshless AIO's price has been increased to at least $450, a big jump from what we were expecting, and we have no way of vouching for the company's ability to deliver on pre-orders. Unfortunately, that price kills the case for us, as there are simply too many other good competitors in ITX at half the price. 

But it still gets an innovation award.

We have an Honorable Mention for this category as well: InWin’s Dubili ATX case. Dubili is an anagram of iBuild, an abbreviation for InWin's DIY "iBuild iShare" brand, as well as an abbreviation of "Do Believe." The instruction manual comes in the form of a dedicated single-purpose app with animated 3D renders, which is absolutely required if you order the flat-packed build-it-yourself DIY edition. We like the Dubili for its unique look, high-quality build and materials, and the modularity of the paneling. That it flat packs is also a cool aspect to the case, creating a fuller DIY experience. The color scheme is also different: A sharp silver-and-orange or a Noctua-style cream-and-brown with gold screws. The case doesn’t win over the Meshless AIO, but we like it enough that it deserves a mention.

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Biggest Disappointment Case: Corsair 6500 Series

Original review | Newegg | Amazon

The Biggest Disappointment is up next. There are a lot of options to consider for this category: Between the GameMax HYPE (read our review), the Tryx LUCA L70, the Corsair 6500, and more. We had our work cut out for us.

The award goes to Corsair for the 6500 series of cases. Although Tryx’s case was a mess, it ultimately doesn’t have the same expectations attached to it as Corsair. To be a disappointment requires some level of expectation.

Corsair wins the award handily: Broadly speaking, Corsair has continued to disappoint ever since it took on huge investment. Like the assets of its corporate overlords, its disappointments are diversified: They bought Origin, which sold us a $6,600 computer that had the CPU underclocked by 1GHz out of the box; they made the A500 air cooler, which had heatpipes so unlevel they sheared our pressure paper. But the company also shipped some excellent products in recent years, and those came from its case division.

The Corsair 4000D (watch our review) was commonly $80 and one of the best sub-$100 cases available for a while. The 5000D (watch our review) was an OK follow-up to that, scaling-up the useful features to a larger size. Corsair was finally doing well with cases again, following a long drought of basically nothing.

But then it launched the 6500 (read our review) series this year, attempting to jump onto a hype train that had already left the station, and doing so with substandard build quality. The Corsair 6500D and 6500X were $200 without fans, both featuring superbly bendy panels without any reinforcement -- which we found totally unacceptable for a $200 so-called “Premium” case. There were lots of plastics, misaligned panels, and build quality issues. 

The 6500D had a number of slapped-on features that didn’t work together. They tried to accommodate back-connect motherboards, but doing so required punching what seems like a completely random hole into a drive cage, which was then entirely left out of the original manual. If you used one of Corsair’s own SHIFT power supplies, you’d have to remove the drive cages completely and move to only NVMe drives. We found build quality issues, design oversight, and a high price to be not only disqualifying from any considerations on our lists, but also deserving of the Biggest Disappointment after falling from the grace of the 4000D.

Corsair is a big company and has the resources to fix this, but it’s a matter of whether they choose to.

Since our critical review, Corsair has dropped the price of the 6500D closer to $150. It’s still worse than an Antec C8 ARGB, which often costs the same or less.

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