AMD stealth-launches a new low power version of its Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card that could be great for a DIY Steam Machine, though it's only shaved 13% off the energy consumption

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.

And then there's the simple fact that there's nothing stopping card vendors from simply making their own 'LP' models by capping the power limit to 140 W, by default. Perhaps AMD has tweaked the voltage-clock curves in its RX 9060 XT LP or maybe even slightly reduced the voltages all round, but I suspect that there's not a whole lot of anything special going on.

None of the usual Radeon card makers have announced any XT LP models just yet, and there's a good chance that if they do, it will only be for certain markets. The days of graphics cards being able to run solely off power via the PCIe slot might be long gone, but any move to reduce the energy consumption and heat output of a GPU, however small it may be, is good news in my books.

Best graphics card 2025

1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070

2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570

4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

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