Amd Stealth-launches A New Low Power Version Of Its Radeon Rx 9060...

At 140 W, it sits right between the RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 in terms of power munchies, and just above the Steam Machine's GPU.

If there's one thing you don't expect to see during the final weeks of a year, right before everywhere shuts shop for the holidays, it's a new graphics card. Normally the preserve of big tech events like CES and Computex, AMD has decided to buck that trend and quietly launch a new Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card. Its unique selling point? A marginally lower power limit.

There was no announcement behind the launch whatsoever, as AMD just dropped the new card into its product pages, alongside its other Radeon models (via BenchLife). Simply labelled as the Radeon RX 9060 XT LP, it's literally just a normal 16 GB RX 9060 XT that's had its 160 W power limit reduced to 140 W.

The product page doesn't mention any changes to clock speeds, but these have been lowered, too, as this can be inferred from AMD's listed theoretical performance figures. For example, where the standard RX 9060 XT has an FP32 vector rate of 25.6 TFLOPS, the LP version is stated as being 25 TFOPS.

Going through all the metrics, the RX 9060 XT LP has clock speeds that are between 2 and 3% lower than the standard XT's, so instead of a boost clock of up to 3130 MHz, you're looking at 3050 MHz. Hardly anything to worry about, yes?

The obvious question to ask at this point is why? What reason does AMD have for releasing such a barely different model? One answer might be the competition from Nvidia. Its GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 cards have power limits of 145 and 130 W, respectively, and as these undercut the RX 9060 XT's 160 W by a reasonable margin, they're more suitable for SFF (small form factor) builds.

Alternatively, it could also be useful if you were planning to make your own Steam Machine. The GPU inside that has a power limit somewhere between 110 and 140 W, and the XT LP just about fits inside that bracket. Given that it's a superior processor to the RDNA 3 chip Valve is using, I know which one I'd prefer to use.

AMD's lowest-powered RDNA 4 graphics card is the RX 9060, sporting a limit of 132 W, but that also has 13% fewer shader units than the XT variant, so it's less of a tempting option than the XT LP. By offering a more energy-friendly RX 9060 XT, without sacrificing much in the way of performance, graphics card vendors may be more tempted to produce Radeon SFF models instead of GeForce ones.

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Source: PC Gamer