9070xt3090 was fried and received a 9070xt.
9070xt3090 was fried and received a 9070xt.
So in short, I was playing Spiderman 2 on my PC with a 3090 and a 7600x in an ATX case with air cooling. I didn’t go all the way into overclocking, which kept things running smoothly (120 fps at 1440p ultrawide with medium to high settings). Suddenly the screen cut out—though my monitor still had power. I thought I’d lost power, but I was relieved it wasn’t a hard failure. The diagnostics came back normal except for the GPU, which gave me a bit of a scare. Still, I was thinking about upgrading my build (not just the GPU, but maybe a new case or motherboard).
I ended up getting a PowerColor Reaper 9070xt, a Fractal Terra case, and an iX MOSAIC 5600X with 32GB RAM. I ordered a decent M.2 ITX motherboard and the ASUS AXP90-47 GPU. My plan was to test different cooling solutions later. At first, the setup worked fine, but I ran into some hiccups with Windows—so I reinstalled everything, fixed the drivers, and enabled DOCP.
When I tried playing Minecraft, my FPS dropped to around 60 with a few tweaks. It was still decent, though not at my usual level. I noticed my CPU was idling at 45-50°C and GPU between 50-60%. That’s pretty normal for an overclocked system. I wondered if the temps were okay but performance was lagging. Was it throttling? I checked everything, but it seemed like the cooling wasn’t enough to keep things at peak.
I’m still figuring this out. If I want better performance, maybe I need to tweak the build more—like adding a better cooler or adjusting temperatures. But for now, I’m happy with what I have and just want to see how it holds up under stress.
50–60% GPU usage suggests your CPU is the bottleneck. The CPU might also be constrained by RAM, so verify you're using dual-channel memory. Performance can still be affected even if overall usage sits between 60–70%, especially if the game uses many cores. A single thread operating at full utilization on one core will restrict your speed.
Ensure ReBAR is enabled, especially for AMD GPUs. For performance tuning, use GPU-z in the Sensors tab. Review the PerfCapReason parameter to identify limiting factors such as Idle, Power limit, or Temp limit. In game settings, verify FSR, upscaling, and other FPS optimizations are correctly configured—these significantly affect frame rates. Keep in mind that some games are optimized for either Nvidia or AMD hardware, and certain adjustments are beyond your control.