I'm planning a new build with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RX 9070 XT, but I'll be buying the parts gradually over the next year as I find good deals. I've already installed a Corsair RM850X in my current system, which has a Ryzen 5 5500, ASRock B450M Pro4 R2.0, 32GB of DDR4-3600 memory, a PowerColor RX 6600 8GB, and a 1TB Crucial P3 NVMe drive.
The motherboard and CPU only provide PCIe 3.0, but I've read that the RX 9070 XT is backward compatible. Would it be a good idea to replace the RX 6600 with the 9070 XT now and use it in this system until I finish building the AM5 platform? Are there any compatibility or performance problems I should expect? I mainly play at 1440p, with a second 1080p monitor.
4 Answers
Before installing it, make sure the motherboard BIOS is reasonably up to date and use a clean AMD graphics-driver installation. Removing the old driver with AMD Cleanup Utility before installing the new Adrenalin driver can help avoid software issues, although the GPU should work without any special BIOS support.
I’d go ahead with it if you can afford the card now. PCIe 3.0 may reduce performance in some situations, but any loss should generally be small compared with the huge upgrade from an RX 6600. The bigger limitation on the current platform will likely be the Ryzen 5 5500, especially in CPU-intensive games or if you’re aiming for very high frame rates.
The PCIe limitation itself probably won’t be noticeable in most games; the older CPU is more likely to hold it back.
Yes, it should work fine. The RX 9070 XT is backward compatible with your PCIe 3.0 slot, and the 850W power supply is more than adequate. Your Ryzen 5 5500 may limit performance in some CPU-heavy or high-refresh-rate games, but at 1440p the GPU will usually be the main bottleneck. You should still see a major improvement over the RX 6600 now, and the card can reach its full potential once you move to the 9800X3D system.
That makes sense—thanks! I mainly wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any compatibility surprises.
Using the card in the current PC is also a practical way to test it while it’s still within the retailer’s return period. That lets you catch any hardware problems early instead of waiting until the rest of the new build is complete. If you plan to keep the AM4 system for a while, a faster compatible CPU could reduce bottlenecks, but you don’t need one just to use the 9070 XT.
I hadn’t thought about cleaning up the graphics driver, so I’ll do that when I swap the cards.