AMD Announces Radeon RX 9060 XT And Ryzen Threadripper 9000 CPUs

AMD has made significant announcements at the Computex trade show in Taiwan this today, revealing concrete details of its highly-anticipated budget-conscious Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card for gamers, and also a new generation of Ryzen Threadripper processors.

Starting with the Radeon RX 9600 XT, AMD has revealed the specifications of the new graphics card, which is set to sit beneath the existing RX 9070 and its launch price of $549 and the RX 9070 XT at $599. Early suggestions are that the card is likely to be priced between $300 and $500 depending on the chosen memory capacity.

The capacity itself is either 8GB or 16GB of video memory, in a similar move to Nvidia with its RTX 5060. The latter, though, has not been met with favorable reviews. In fact, PC Gamer said it best in its review of the RTX 5060 and in its own words, things don’t look great, with inconsistent performance and Nvidia’s would be silver bullet, Multi Frame Generation, at the heart of its problems.

By contrast, AMD has enjoyed sales up to 10 times higher with its RX 9070 XT and according to some retailers, even outselling equivalent Nvidia RTX 50-series models and it’s hoped the RX 9060 XT 8GB and 16GB will offer yet more compelling reasons to shun Nvidia and steal market share.

Comparing the RX 9060 and 9070 series cards above and below we can see that the RX 9070 XT has double the AMD RDNA 4 compute units, RT accelerators and AI accelerators and offers nearly double the AI TOPS too. If you’re worried about power consumption, then the maximum board power is just 182W, but can be as low as 150W and combined with a standard 8-pin connector, older and less capable power supplies should handle it fine.

Sadly there’s no word on pricing, performance or availability, but the company will be making further announcements this week and in the near future so watch this space.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9800X, 9970X And 9960X

The second announcement is that of new Zen-5 based Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. There are Pro models, aimed squarely at workstations and professional users, but AMD is classing the standard Threadripper 9000 models as high-end desktop. Whether that is accurate or not depends on the price of both processors, as the previous generation certainly didn’t appeal to desktop users as much as the first few generations as they had a far higher platform cost.

Three new models will be available, with no core count increases compared to the previous non-Pro models. The maximum core count is 64 for the 9980X, 32 for the 9970X and 24 for the 9960X. However, all four CPUs offer peak boost frequencies up to 5.4GHz and use the same Zen 5 architecture as the company’s current Ryzen 9000 CPUs such as the Ryzen 9 9950X, which has 16 cores. Pricing and availability are yet to be announced.