After riding a rollercoaster of various ridiculous prices since it launched in March, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 is now finally available for a reasonable price that isn't far off its MSRP. Right now, you can grab an ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9070 graphics card for $599.99 from Newegg, and while this is still ittedly $50 above the $549 MSRP originally mooted by AMD, it's a hell of a lot better than some of the ludicrous prices we've seen for this GPU lately.
Thanks to its 16GB of VRAM and hefty rendering power, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 review, it's a much better buy than the competing Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 at MSRP, as this GPU only has 12GB of VRAM, which limits the settings you can enable in some of the latest games.
Comparatively, RTX 5070 cards are also still generally priced above their $549 MSRP in the US, with prices starting at $599.99 and going upwards from there - at these prices, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 is absolutely the better GPU. The card that's going for $599.99 is an ASRock Challenger model, which runs at the AMD reference specs, meaning the GPU clock speed can boost to up to 2,520MHz. It also features three cooling fans and a strip of RGB lighting along the edge.
While $599.99 is still above the quoted MSRP, this is a decent GPU for the money, especially given the price of the competition. In my tests, I found that the Radeon RX 9070 will happily play some of the latest demanding games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with the graphics set to the ultra preset, at 2,560 x 1,440 and still average 92fps, even without any help from FSR - it can even run it at 59fps at 4K.
In some games, such as Call of Duty Black Ops 6, it can also cope with the game maxed out at 4K, again without any help from FSR. AMD has upped its upscaling game with this generation of GPUs too, with its new FSR 4 tech using the GPUs' AI cores to make game graphics look significantly better than when using its older versions of FSR, with much less noise and blurriness. Enable FSR 4 in Black Ops 6 on the Radeon RX 9070 and it still looks great, while running at an average of 109fps at 4K.
Basically, if you have $600 earmarked for a GPU upgrade, and you've been holding off buying until now, here is a good chance to grab yourself a decent graphics card for a fair price. If you want to buy this graphics card, click on this link here to take you directly to the page for it on Newegg.
If you want to see what you can get from the competition, then make sure you also read my how to install a GPU, which takes you through the whole graphics card upgrade process.
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