ASRock Radeon RX 9070 Steel Legend: Performance, Power Analysis & Noise Output

Part Analysis

The main parts of the graphics card are the backplate, cooler, PCB, PCIe bracket, and fan assembly.

The cooling solution uses five heatpipes.

The backplate.

Here are photos of the PCB’s front and rear sides. It is sad to see most of the capacitor spots on the PCB’s back side empty. I wonder why ASRock didn’t bother installing them, and how they affect the GPU’s performance! On the top PCB side, Apaq provides all polymer caps.

The AMD Navi 48 GPU follows the RDNA 4 architecture. TSMC manufactures it and uses a 5 nm production process. Its die size is 357 mm², and it has 53.9 billion transistors.

The capacitors behind the GPU provide power during the transient loads.

An 8+3-phase VRM (highlighted in red and purple) handles the GPU, and a 3-phase VRM (highlighted in green and orange) handles VRAM.

All power phases use

Two Monolithic Power Systems MP2868A controllers handle the board’s power phases for the GPU and its memory.

All GPU and VRAM VRM phases use Monolithic MPS MP87661 DrMOS with a rating of 60A.

A pair of ALPHA OMEGA AOZ2261 synchronous buck regulators provides power to secondary circuits.

The H56G42AS8DX-014 GDDR6 memory chips are made by Hynix and are rated for 20 Gbps.

I found a NUC121ZC2AE 32-bit microcontroller ( MCU ) with ARM® Cortex-M0 core. It runs up to 50 MHz and supports 32 KB Flash, 8 KB SRA,M and 12-bit ADC.

The card’s power sockets. Type PCIe 6+2 pin.

Some more photos of the board’s power headers.

The fan’s model number is FD9015U12S. Its manufacturer is FirstD, a brand I have never heard of. I also don’t have a clue about their bearings, and I don’t want to destroy them to find this information.