2025 With AMD Radeon

2025 has been an interesting year at MML towers, many new products to explore and tech to get to grips with, including new graphics cards from AMD. They have often been lauded by voices on the internet as the price to performance kings, which it’s a sentiment we cannot argue with! As component costs for the industry soar due to factors I won’t be drawn on, I think it’s worth looking back on our year using AMD graphics, and seeing how well they can be made to fit your next build.

Starting out the year we built the diminutive Jonsbo TK-0. Spoilers, but this may be my personal favorite of the year. Its slick cubular (yes I know that’s not a word) design, wrap-around curved glass and wood accents make this one feel right at home in a TV set-up. We actually have this one in our gaming area. Inside we have a winning combination of the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and an ASUS Dual RX7600XT give it a good level of punch for 1440p gaming at a high frame rate in most games, or dial it back to 1080p for some competitive action! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the most powerful system around, but it was an affordable build perfect for its use case!

In March we saw the launch of the Radeon RX9070 and RX9070 XT. It looked as if they were to take the mid-spec market by storm, so of course we had to get one in to play with! As much as we wanted the RX9070 XT, we thought it best to go for the base version with 16gb of GDDR6 VRAM. ASUS were touting their Prime series as being MSRP graphics cards, and a black unit with subtle white pin striping seemed as if it would be right at home in just about any system. When we opened it up we were quite surprised at its slender body, at only 2.5 slots thick it should work well in a lot of small form factor cases - but more on that later! We decided to stick with a bit of an ASUS theme for this one and built a mean looking system in the TUF Gaming GT302. It turned out great!

It turned out from here that the ASUS Prime Radeon range was going to be a bit of a go-to for future builds. The aesthetic just fits with every type of build! The no-nonsense, no RGB visard is a strong contender for best universal design of the year! So let's have a quick look at how else we’ve used it (in its different variations).

So how well did the ASUS Prime RX 9070 work in a small form factor build? We had to test it! It took more than a month after launch to get this together, it was very much worth the wait! We got in a Thermaltake TR100 ITX chassis and went to town! The slim form factor of the GPU paid dividends, making this a simple build, but yet without the graphics card looking small. We think it turned out awesome! 

In May Fractal Design got in touch, asking if we’d like to build with the new Meshify 3 case. It had built in RGB that didn’t need software to run it, which sounded like a win! There was a bit of a caveat though, softwareless nature of the Meshify 3 included only RGB elements which connected to the hub. Which is an understandable limitation, but that meant that we needed a graphics card without RGB to keep our lighting in sync. Once again we plumped for the ASUS Prime RX9070 as an affordable, capable and aesthetically pleasing choice that fit the theme or the build while delivering the required performance. Once everything was working and all kinks with the prerelease hub we worked out we were gaming at 1440p and very pleased with the results.

We managed to get our hands on the Radeon RX9060 XT in June. The version we got has 8gb of VRAM, which some might say is too little, but I would say as with anything set your expectations accordingly! We built it into the NZXT H3 Flow as a small form factor, high airflow rig, focused on 1080p high frame rate gaming. For those who want to enter the world of e-sports, I have to say this is a solid entry point! I was pleasantly surprised with how well this little and fairly inexpensive build performed. It also had the added benefit of being portable, so if you’re a LAN event gamer you could certainly do worse! (yes, I’ve seen you carting your ginormous E-ATX rig to events!)

The Lian Li O11 Mini V2 launched at the tail end of the summer, the original had been one of Matt’s favourite cases, so we were excited to get into this one. The thing with Lian Li though is their products go heavy on the RGB, which when done right looks amazing! But…. we decided that we’d let the case and the fans do the light show and we’d pop in the Prime RX9070 to discreetly do the heavy lifting. It looked right at home in this flashy build, commanding just the right amount of presence, while not distracting from the overall visual spectacle of the build!

Finally we decided to build on a budget in September. Featuring the ASUS Prime Radeon RX9060XT and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600

inside the NZXT H5 Flow. The build looked very mature and classy, thanks to minimalist design of the case and graphics card. At the time the finished build came in at less than $1200, which now seems like an amazing deal!

Overall it’s been a solid year for building with AMD, and with everything going on with pricing of PC components we’re hopeful that they will remain kings of price to performance! If you are interested in the products mentioned you’ll find affiliate links below.

US

ASUS Prime RX9060 XT: https://amzn.to/3NiAbfT

ASUS Prime RX9070: https://amzn.to/49eIQHq 

ASUS Prime RX9070 XT: https://amzn.to/4jpRZlc 

UK

ASUS Prime RX9060 XT: https://amzn.to/4psEfrp 

ASUS Prime RX9070: https://amzn.to/4sqRdbF 

ASUS Prime RX9070 XT: https://amzn.to/45zUjAj