If the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT comes with a sub-$400 price tag, it might be the best-value graphics card PC gamers have ever seen - Related to has, not, tag,, seen, rx

Early Leak Claims AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Might Reach NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Territory

Judging by the current state of gaming GPUs, it might appear to some that true budget-class cards are a thing of the past. That presented, it is almost certain that both NVIDIA and AMD are cooking entry-level GPUs to cater to folks who can't shell out the astoundingly high prices that modern mid-range and high-end GPUs command, with AMD having already confirmed the launch for RX 9060 class cards sometime in Q2 of this year. Previous leaks have indicated that the RX 9060 will likely hit the scene with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, whereas its XT sibling will boast an additional 4 GB. NVIDIA is also expected to drop the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti cards sometime towards the end of this month, likely in 8 GB and 16 GB flavors of the shinier GDDR7 [website], a fresh leak by Moore's Law Is Dead (MLID) has claimed that the Radeon RX 9060 XT will outperform the RTX 4060 Ti in performance, slotting in between the RTX 4060 Ti and the Radeon RX 7700 XT. Moreover, he added that AMD may even push clocks to bring the card closer to the RTX 4070 territory - a sweet position to hold indeed. Regarding launch date, MLID expects the card to hit the arena sometime in April. Of course, as with all leaks and rumors, accept this information with a grain of salt, especially considering that MLID's assertions are sourced from a single party. The RTX 5060/Ti is expected to be priced in the $400-$500 range, which means the RX 9060 XT will likely have to be priced in the lower-end of that in order to make for a compelling value proposition.

As you may have already seen, AMD officially showcased its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT earlier this week, including pricing details that were ......

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If the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT comes with a sub-$400 price tag, it might be the best-value graphics card PC gamers have ever seen

As you may have already seen, AMD officially showcased its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT earlier this week, including pricing details that were an extremely welcome sight. Now, I’m starting to wonder about the Radeon RX 9060 - a GPU that, if priced correctly, could be an extremely attractive value proposition for PC gamers.

Naturally, I’m not going to get too excited until we see some real-world performance figures for the new AMD cards. Team Red made some bold hints at in its RX 9070 XT performance showcase, placing the GPU just slightly above the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti in terms of native 4K gaming performance despite it being $150 cheaper (and let’s be honest, you can’t get a 5070 Ti at retail price right now anyway).

I suspect that’s a load of baloney, since AMD used an overclocked RX 9070 XT for their testing and their comparison 5070 Ti was most likely fished out of a crypto miner’s dumpster and then spat on for good measure (AMD: this is a joke, please don’t sue me). AMD also only showcased raw native 4K framerates, while Nvidia is keen to push the effectiveness of its new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation attributes, which - for all the debate surrounding them - do significantly improve your in-game fps.

Still, it’s very impressive stuff - but at $549 (around £520 / AU$880), even the non-XT version of the RX 9070 can’t exactly be called a budget GPU. It’s more of a midrange card, and while it looks like a great midrange card, I’d still argue that the best choice right now for PC builders on a budget is the Intel Arc B580, which scored a rare five stars in our review for its solid 1440p gaming performance and extremely reasonable $[website] / £[website] / AU$449 price tag.

So, as things stand right now, it looks like AMD might be taking the midrange GPU space by storm, while Intel holds onto the budget market and Nvidia remains the undisputed king of the high-end. But with more RX 9000-series cards yet to come, it’s entirely possible that AMD could descend on Intel with some fiery (but affordable) wrath - after all, AMD made it clear last year that it would no longer be targeting the premium space, with a greater focus on midrange and budget GPUs.

So, the RX 9060. We know very little about it right now, but we can make some reasonable extrapolations about it based on previous leaks and our existing knowledge of the RX 9070 cards.

For starters, some leaks from back in December proved to be mostly accurate regarding the 9070 and 9070 XT, correctly predicting the name change from RX 8000 and the upgrade to RDNA 4 as well as AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaling tech. Those leaks claimed that pricing for the two new GPUs would be in the $449 to $649 range, which has also proven accurate, although it was admittedly a fairly wide net being cast there. The same leaker claimed that upcoming Navi 44 GPUs (the 9070 cards are Navi 48) would sit in the $179 to $349 price range, presumably with the RX 9060 XT - or perhaps just a plain old RX 9060 - at the top.

This is where I start to doubt the leaks a little; a price of $349 would be a $200 gap between that card and the RX 9060, which feels like a fairly wide spacing when it comes to pricing. $399 feels a bit more reasonable to me, especially if we do get an RX 9060 XT - and as PC Gamer reports, we can apparently expect “multiple RX 9060 products” to land in the second quarter of 2025.

But if the leaks are accurate and AMD does produce an RX 9060 XT for $349 or less in a few months’ time, I’ll absolutely lose my merde (pardon my French). The Radeon RX 7600 XT was a decent enough GPU, but it failed to measure up to Nvidia’s competing RTX 4060 when it came to bang for your buck.

AMD looks to be making major strides in that department, though. Even if the RX 9070 XT is 10% behind the RTX 5070 Ti in terms of raw performance - and I suspect the average might be a lot closer than that - it’s a full 20% cheaper, and there’s still no sign of a desktop RTX 5060 from Nvidia. While I do imagine that card will eventually surface, AMD has the gloves off in the affordable GPU arena right now - and there’s frankly not a hope in hell we’ll see a desktop RTX 5050, so anything below that performance level that AMD decides to offer could absolutely dominate that price point. Yes, I know Intel’s new budget GPUs are good. No, I don’t think they’ll outclass new Radeon cards.

The fact is that AMD has had skin in the budget game for a long time. My partner, who admittedly mostly plays Stardew Valley, is still rocking a Radeon RX 570 that runs perfectly well for 1080p gaming - a graphics card that retailed at just $179 in the US when it was released back in 2017. I've offered to replace it with something a bit more current, but he says "Why? It still works fine."

The affordable to midrange space is where Team Red excels, and after some small missteps in the previous desktop generation, I reckon it’s ready to take back its crown. With Nvidia focused on AI and ridiculously high performance GPUs, there’s no time like the present.

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Judging by the current state of gaming GPUs, it might appear to some that true budget-class cards are a thing of the past. That revealed, it is almost cer......

The gaming laptop I’m drooling for has no GPU (and it’s not a laptop)

One of my tech dilemmas is that I’ve somehow accumulated a disparate group of laptops with integrated GPUs. That means they’re great to write on but when it comes to graphics processing power — without using expletives — let’s just say they can’t play any big-name PC games.

My work laptop, for example, can handle just about any work app or program I need to run and is as compact and portable as heck, but will it let me potter for even a minute in Bethesda’s Starfield? Nope — not a chance.

That just means swapping hats on articles from tech pieces to gaming pieces for PCWorld is a little more cumbersome than it needs be. I need to also swap devices, or else I’m relegated to testing only pixilated indie games (not that I don’t love playing pixilated indie games — I’m really looking forward to the release of Cattle Country on Steam, by the way). But it would be nice to have a laptop that can do it all.

Alas, Asus has thrown me a lifeline with the 2025 Asus ROG Flow Z13, which will, when I get my mitts on one, conveniently make that problem go away. Its specs, when they were revealed at CES 2025, really surprised me for one reason: It didn’t have a dedicated GPU listed.

That makes it very different. To be honest, previous year’s ROG Flow Z13 iterations haven’t blown me away. Not because they weren’t well-built, but because they have occupied a dubious gray area of performance, being less powerful than most fully fledged gaming laptops.

That’s despite the configurations having their own dGPUs and being fairly expensive. But the 2025 ROG Flow Z13 is inexorably more powerful than any model that has come before it, and that’s with no dGPU.

What makes it so special is its AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, the top model of which integrates a Radeon 8060S GPU consisting of 40 — yes, 40! — RDNA [website] GPU cores. This APU comes under the banner of AMD’s Strix Halo laptop hardware, which includes the AMD Ryzen AI Max platform revealed earlier this year and shown off by AMD at CES 2025.

In case you missed it, AMD Ryzen AI Max is designed to be a unified computing solution for both CPU power and integrated graphics performance. In the top-tier 2025 ROG Flow Z13 model, that power is obvious — along with a huge iGPU, its Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chiplet boasts 16 AMD Zen 5 cores and 32 threads with a maximum boost clock of [website] So there’s serious compute power there for the taking. The chip feeds an impressive 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM running at 8,000Hz too.

The fact that there’s no dGPU means it has killer portability. Yes, it’s a compact 13-inch size, which isn’t anything to rave about in itself, but Asus has also managed to keep the weight down to just [website] pounds ([website] and achieved a maximum thickness of just [website] inches (12mm). It makes any alternative gaming laptop look like a chunky, heavy, overwrought beast.

So, what’s the catch? Surely it must compromise on GPU power, considering it has no dGPU, right? No, in fact it doesn’t. Graphically it’s more than a match for most rivals, poised to shred in triple-A games.

Graphics folks are already comparing its chip’s graphics performance to mid-range Nvidia RTX 4070 GPUs and claiming it has a [website] to 3x boost in performance over Nivida dGPUs paired with AMD Strix Point processors, which is very solid performance for a processor/laptop with only an iGPU, if you ask me.

Furthermore, AMD asserts it has demonstrated [website] faster gaming performance than Intel’s flagship Lunar Lake Core Ultra 9 288V processor, and 84 percent quicker rendering than the Apple MacBook M4 Pro.

On the power side the ROG Flow Z13 can draw to a maximum 120W TDP, so there’s more than enough grunt available too.

Indeed, at the Asus booth at CES 2025, the ROG Flow Z13 had no issues playing Black Myth: Wukong, on its [website], 180Hz display, which is a very promising sign.

Okay, so granted it can shred in games and is portable, there must be something else we can catch this laptop out on, right? Admittedly, I do have a few lingering questions… Being a unified CPU / graphics solution, Strix Halo represents a kind of U-turn from previous AMD mobile processor platforms not just because the AMD Ryzen AI Max has an integrated GPU.

Looking at the stats charts it has a noticeable CPU processing advantage over AMD Strix Point, but it’s likely less power efficient (since it lacks scaled-down AMD Zen5c cores). That did get me thinking about the Z13’s battery life and also performance when power levels are lowered; Strix Point holds its own very well at lower power levels.

Still, initial reviews say the ROG Flow Z13’s battery life, in the very least, is quite good, lasting more than 10 hours (for lighter tasks. Battery life for gaming will be less than that.).

I’ve had slight concerns about its cooling too, considering the 120W maximum TDP (that’s a lot of power in a thin and lightweight laptop). But those too, for now at least, have mostly been abated, based on the list of the Z13’s cooling apparatus.

Asus has incorporated a specially designed vapor chamber and air vents that direct air behind the touchscreen. It also sports second-generation Arc Flow fans with [website] fins to circulate air.

So, trusting that those things work as they should, this laptop sounds like quite the package. Not only is it extremely lightweight and thin and therefore portable, but it’s stacked with CPU power and, more importantly, GPU power (sans a dGPU), and without the chunkiness of a gaming laptop.

Of course, I’m looking forward to reading more reviews when they become available to get a superior handle on the points I made about cooling and efficiency. Right now, though, my intention to get one of these laptops is unshakable.

Further reading: The best gaming laptops.

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Assimilator And it'll probably take another [website] years for devices using this chip to appear.

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