AMD RX 9060 XT GPU rumored to have 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, avoiding NVIDIA's RTX 5060 8GB blunder

AMD's RX 9060 XT has been the subject of further leaked specs, and not only have we had a glimpse of some nippy clock speeds for this GPU, but it appears that AMD is going to trump NVIDIA in terms of full support for PCIe lanes.

According to @momomo_us, a hardware leaker who pops up with info regularly on X (hat tip to VideoCardz), boost clocks for the RX 9060 XT are going to be pushed hard to around 3.3GHz, with Game clocks at around the 2.7GHz to 2.8GHz level.

That's a lot faster than RX 9070 models, particularly the vanilla spin on that higher-tier RDNA 4 GPU which only clocks in at around 2.5GHz for boost. Previous speculation has insisted that AMD is going fast with the clocks for the 9060 XT and this appears to very much back up that assertion.

As well as the fresh clock speed info, we're also told that the PCIe 5.0 graphics card will support the full complement of 16 PCIe lanes.

This has been a controversial area for NVIDIA, which made the decision to cut costs with its RTX 5060 GPUs, and across the whole family these boards only use half the lanes. While 8 lanes is fine for a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, it proves a meaningful bottleneck with the slower PCIe 4.0 standard that a good few gamers still use. Note that this only applies to the RTX 5060s that have 8GB of VRAM, as with 16GB of video RAM (on the Ti cards with this loadout), there's far less running off to use the system memory for the GPU.

While AMD was previously expected to follow suit with 8 PCIe lanes for the 9060 XT, if this rumor is correct, Team Red is avoiding the misstep NVIDIA took here, with the reaction to the performance drop on PCIe 4.0 with the RTX 5060 (and Ti) 8GB being quite a flame-fest. (And if you've got a PCIe 3.0 motherboard, then you're in real trouble, though that'll be a very niche set of would-be purchasers of a modern mid-range GPU, of course).

A smart move

This looks to be a smart move from AMD, at least in the case of the 8GB model of the RX 9060 XT, which is supposedly incoming.

Rumor has it that AMD will produce both 8GB and 16GB variants of the 9060 XT when the GPU launches theoretically in mid-May (ahead of a June on-sale date), much like NVIDIA with the RTX 5060 Ti - although that remains to be confirmed.

Some past chatter reckoned that Team Red might stick with just 16GB, and that would pretty much eliminate any VRAM-related slowdown worries anyway, but the latest rumors are that both 8GB and 16GB cards are debuting. Not dropping to 8 PCIe 5.0 lanes makes sense in that light, too.