The RX 9070 XT might not be the truly mid-range graphics card I'm still dreaming of but it turned my latest sci-fi PC build into a frame rate menace

Oh, please let it end. Please. I was so excited to start writing these features. The plan was simple enough. Every other month, I pitch a new and exciting PC build with the latest and greatest hardware available, do an in-depth guide, cover the part selection, take some lovely amateur photography, and everyone's happy—at least that was the theory. Then Nvidia "launched" its RTX 50-series, and the whole market went to hell in a handcart. Graphics card? In stock? What's that? It's basically impossible to find anything at its retail price at this point, and you know, available. You have to sit on lottery lists, Discord stock channels, and pre-order promises to even be in with a whiff of a chance of picking up a graphics card at its retail listing.

When AMD's RX 9070 XT launched, I was super pumped. An affordable graphics card that delivered on its promises with a ton of stock straight out of the gate and a retail listing of $600. Yes, AMD, yes. Let's go. Honestly, it sounded incredible, and for a few weeks it was true. So, as I did, I priced up a build, requested in the parts, and then, three weeks later, no stock, price bump, and it's almost twice the cost. Nice.

Because there's so little stock of anything, everyone is buying everything they can—enthusiasts, industry, scalpers, all of em. Including the RX 9070 XT. It doesn't matter if it's the latest and greatest or a two-year-old has-been; if you see a GPU in stock somewhere at a reasonable price, you're probably dreaming.

That was kind of to be expected, of course; the 9070 XT is a good GPU, and if you can get one, it performs incredibly well, butting heads quite easily with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti, and its ilk, and it particularly dominates at 1440p. Yet, the cheapest I could find it with an "available soon" tag at time of writing was $860. Only 260 bucks more than its launch price.

Anyway, if you're reading this in the future and the tariff turmoil and pathetically poor stock situations have somehow managed to miraculously resolve themselves, (or you live in the UK or elsewhere with reasonable prices and actual product availability), let's talk details. This is meant to be a "mid-range" GPU build (if you can call $600 mid-range in the modern era), and there's a lot to discuss. As PC goes I've taken some liberties on the parts, to really push the Evolv X2 and its subsequent components to the limits. Best gaming PC you can buy today? Not quite, but it could be with just a few small changes.

The Specs

Total: $3,507 / £2,997

It might not look like it, but I have tried to tone down some of the component selection here compared to my last RTX 5090 PC build. And, well, I kinda got a little sidetracked. That's namely because of Phanteks' latest chassis, the Evolv X2.

I've long been a fan of its Evolv line; it's almost always delivered on the quality front, and when I saw it was "BTF" compatible as well, well, I just had to try it out in that configuration. Particularly given how gorgeous the press shots looked. The only problem is that that motherboard is 20% of the total build budget on its own. Yeah…. That said, there are a lot of parts that you can cut back on without necessarily impacting overall performance, and I'm going to go into detail on that in just a moment. Still, it's a fairly big price tag up there, I'll it, certainly for what the RX 9070 XT is meant to represent.

The core componentry that's driving performance in this rig (not including the case, the power supply, and the cooling) comes to around $2,511. There's some corners you can shave off cost here to bring the overall price down, and of course $1,000 on the tertiary stuff can be brought down too, so it's not all terrible news here.

For the processor, I've gone with Intel's Core Ultra 7 265K. Despite having a particularly rocky launch, since its debut, Intel and Microsoft have really ironed out the bugs when it comes to its overall performance. On the whole, it's now an incredibly well-rounded chip and surprisingly efficient, with plenty enough grunt to handle the RX 9070 XT's frame-generating shenanigans.

Intel's done away with multi-threading and instead is opting for a single-thread solution throughout, utilizing eight Performance cores and 12 Efficient cores for the Ultra 7. It taps out at about 5.5 GHz under load and comes with a healthy 36 MB of L2 cache, all built off the back of TSMC's N3B manufacturing process. At $339, it's a relative bargain compared to the Ultra 9 285K's $590 price tag. For $250 extra, all you get are four more cores and a slight bump to clock speed, and that's kind of it. Still, whether it's rendering or gaming, Intel's well-rounded Ultra platform should produce the numbers. I hope.

My first, ridiculously overpriced PC part pick is Asus's Z890 Hero BTF motherboard. $700. Yeah, ouch. The standard Hero comes in at $100 less than that, and to be honest, you can get some really clean boards with solid connectivity at around the $300-400 mark anyway for the Z890 chipset. Sadly, though, if you want BTF with Intel's Ultra line and you want to ditch those front-facing connectors, then it's the only one around right now. It's also extremely over-engineered for this rig, with a 22+1+2+2 power stage design, for six M.2 slots (3x 5.0 and 3x 4.0), and an absolutely wild amount of rear I/O.

In fact, it's got the works: 2.5G and 5G Ethernet, WiFi 7, three Type-C ports (with various Thunderbolt 4 and USB 10 Gbps configs), plus eight USB Type-As and the usual assortment of odds and ends. It's massively overkill for what we've got going on here, but y'know, needs must. Oh, and it's also got AI everything, because it's 2025 and AI, obviously.

For the U cooling, I've equally gone for something a little over the top in the form of NZXT's Kraken Elite 360 RGB (the 2024 edition). This is an incredibly interesting product. Somehow, NZXT has managed to circumnavigate Asetek's rather aggressive pump patent using a "custom-designed NZXT Turbine pump," solution that supposedly delivers 10% improved flow rate. Not going to lie, pretty impressed by that. Not the pump delivering more coolant, but the dodging of Asetek's legal team. On top of that, the 2024 edition also comes with a far fatter 2.72-inch IPS LCD display (640x640 @ 60 Hz), and all of the cabling, power, and USB connectivity is handled by a breakout cable running from a controller directly attached to the radiator itself. Lovely stuff.

Downside? Very expensive. $320 expensive. That's even pricier than Tryx's Panorama 360 with its curved OLED display. Still, it does look incredible.

On to RAM, and I've decided to go with something a little different, and again more to lean into the aesthetics of the overall system rather than cost-efficiency. That's going to be Corsair's Dominator Titanium memory kit, with 32 GB of the good stuff, at 7200 MT/s C34. That's a real tight real-world latency on that, and pretty much as good as you can get these days. Plus, they look stellar, and I'm a big fan of the overall design. Still, this is one of those areas you can save a bit of cash. Drop down to a comfortable lower-spec 6,400 MT/s kit at the $100-120 mark and you'll be laughing (it doesn't have to be Corsair, don't @ me).

For storage, I've forsaken my twin SSD mantra and opted for a single large drive instead. I have split this into two partitions to try and make my life a little easier, opting for 1TB for the OS and 3TB for the game and backup storage. That's all inside of a 4 TB Samsung 9100 Pro. It's a seriously rapid PCIe 5.0 drive, at least on the sequential front, and, although not exactly super quick on the random 4Ks, it does deliver some solid performance in games nonetheless. It is pricey, though, and again, if you dropped it to something a little cheaper, maybe a 2 TB Crucial T500 for your secondary storage and a 1 TB T700 for your OS, you'd be saving around $200 on the equation, with little reduction in overall performance (albeit a 1 TB loss to total storage space).

But we're here for the GPU, right? AMD's RX 9070 XT delivers some seriously strong ray tracing performance and kicks the RTX 5070 Ti to the curb for a, sort of, lower price (if you can find it). It's built off the back of AMD's Navi 48 XL GPU die, on TSMC's N4C manufacturing process (confusingly a 5 nm solution), and comes complete with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, delivering around 640 GB/s of total bandwidth. TGP isn't terrible, at 304 W, but the Asus Prime OC unit I'm using here does require no less than three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which honestly makes me long for 12VHPWR again (more on why that is in a moment).

Otherwise, it's a killer card, making a serious case for itself being one of the best graphics cards of 2025, delivering easily at 4K, with close to 40-60 fps in even some of the most aggressive titles out there, without FSR assistance. I've also gone ahead and included one of Phanteks' vertical PCIe 4.0 GPU brackets with this too. To be clear, you do not need this in your build, and it does add an additional $100 onto the cost above. But! You can angle your graphics card with it (if you've got the cable space), plus it comes with a strip of RGB that perfectly matches the Evolv X2's stylization.

Speaking of the Evolv X2. This thing is stunning to look at. There's something about its monolithic, obelisk-esque shape that just draws the eye. A mixture of curved plastic stylized to look like brushed aluminum, tempered glass, fan recesses, and a clever plinth styling that really sets it apart from the crowd. It s up to seven 120 mm fans (no love for 140 mm here) operating in a chimney-style cooling solution, drawing cool air up through the PSU shroud and the bottom of the chassis up into the main chamber and then exhausting directly out of the roof and the rear. One thing to bear in mind, however, the X2 absolutely isn't a liquid-cooling chassis. Certainly not in the same way its predecessors were. Perhaps it's a sign of the times and how far custom loops have fallen out of mainstream PC building culture, but it does only a single 360 mm radiator in the roof, and that's it.

As for the final puzzle pieces here, for cooling I'm running seven of Lian Li's Wireless TL 120 mm fans, in all black (confusing to choose and install, but surprisingly effective and easy to set up), and for the power supply I've nabbed one of Phanteks' AMP GH 850 W units. According to PC Part Picker, at most the build should draw around 712 W from the wall, giving us around 16-17% headroom on that unit, plus the braided cables, 80+ Gold rating, and reasonable price point make it a sure-fire pick for a build like this.

The Build

The Performance

There's a lot going on here from a pure performance perspective. In many ways this machine is unreasonable. It's not something I'd actively recommend folk buy, which probably sounds quite counterintuitive given it's my job to write a compelling argument for this build I've priced together, but from a cost-efficiency perspective, it doesn't quite make sense. We all know that you don't pair an Intel Core i3 with an RTX 4090, for instance; it's just wrong, and in a lot of ways there are picks here that do echo that sentiment, albeit in perhaps a more gentle manner. A $700 motherboard, for instance, paired with a $324 processor and an $860 GPU with a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD is, on the surface, unnecessary, and I'll hold my hands up and it to that.

This was more about trying out a whole host of concepts in a single build rather than really ensuring the best bang for the buck PC possible. Does the Evolv X2 hold up with BTF? Is the Core Ultra 7 a worthy processor today compared to launch? Can the RX 9070 XT keep up with the latest and greatest Nvidia offerings? And just how good can you make this whole cornucopia of parts look together? Those are the questions I was keen to answer.

Wading through the performance metrics, and we can see that a lot of those questions do ring out true. The Ultra 7 is a dominant chip, with strong single-core performance in Cinebench and decent 7-Zip and Blender scores too. Far greater than when it first launched. That's a real shame, given right now it does feel like it could potentially have the chops to be one of the best Us you could buy. Certainly for the price. The RX 9070 XT likewise manages those 1440p titles very well, scoring on average 100 fps across all of our five games on test. Even Cyberpunk, with ray tracing ramped up and FSR disabled, landed 67 fps on the average frame rate. Chuck in FSR and frame generation as well, and scores easily shoot above 100 fps here too at 1440p.

The thing that impressed me the most, however, were the temperatures. I was apprehensive about it going into this. Particularly given the chassis design. Evolv's haven't exactly been known for top-tier airflow, and there's a lot of glass here. Combine that with the fact that those three intakes are drawing air in from a crowded PSU compartment, jam-packed with cables, with an overall limited number (by today's standards) of 120 mm fans, and well, on paper at least, it does seem like a potential disaster waiting to happen. Yet, no single component hit above 80°C. The Core Ultra 7 topped out at 79 degrees, and even under load in-game the RX 9070 XT still slid just under the 60°C mark. Similarly, VRM and SSD temps remained incredibly cool throughout. A true testament to the design of modern cooling solutions.

The Conclusion

So then, what can we take away from this build? This effervescent obelisk? Building in it with BTF is surprisingly well thought out. Even with stock parts and standard-length power supply cables, Phanteks has really gone to town on the cable management solutions here, and it really shows. The finished product, particularly with Lian Li wireless fans, looks an absolute treat. The only major downside was working around that limited power supply.

To be completely transparent, we create a similar version of this build for the print mag (ideally identical, but print deadlines are a nightmare at times). At the time of the photoshoot, our Asus Z890 Hero BTF board had yet to arrive, so I used the stock standard Z890 Hero variant we had in-house instead. That was great, except that board requires an additional 8-pin PCIe connector just below the 24-pin to even power on. The problem with that is that the RX 9070 XT also needs three, and the AMP GH 850 only comes with three singular 8-pin cables. There's no dual connectors or anything included in the box or any additional PCIe power ports on the PSU itself.

So, despite the system's power requirements being 16% lower than the PSU's rating, out of the box, you don't have enough connectors. In the end I byed this by using a larger 1000W model in the print version instead, but that is an additional cost that shouldn't really be necessary. Arguably, I'm not even sure the GPU really needs all that extra juice either. In my own testing, power draw never went above 589 W, for the entire system.

That's even more of an issue when you consider all the tertiary products now that require PCIe power as well. Not only do we have silly motherboards needing it to even boot (because apparently everyone needs to connect 36 fans off a single header these days), but you've also got things like Corsair's iCUE Link hubs and other third-party products drawing from the things too, despite USB-C power delivery clearly being a thing. It's frustrating, especially given how high costs for PC parts are these days. It's like we're being funneled into buying larger PSUs, not because we need to, but because the entire ecosystem requires it. Hyperbole? Maybe a bit, but if it's a sign of things to come, I ain't a fan.

The saving grace for this build? Well, rather weirdly, despite being $100 more, the BTF variant of the Z890 Hero doesn't have that PCIe power mobo connector that the standard Hero does, so in this case, you can save the cash and grab a lower wattage PSU instead.

All said and done, I love it; this tron-looking beauty is outstanding to look at, the Core Ultra 7 is incredibly dominant, and the RX 9070 XT (if you can find one in stock) is an awesome mid-range graphics card if you can get it at close to its retail price. If the price does drop to reasonable levels again, 4K gaming on a mid-range budget is slowly but surely becoming a reality. Until then, well, we'll just have to wait and see.