Looks like a reference design AMD RX 9070 XT card has shown up in China, but let’s not get carried away with thoughts of MBA cards just yet

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is arguably the card to grab this generation (so far), assuming you can find it in stock. But AMD never released a reference ‘MBA’ (Made by AMD) design for purchase, so it’s been down to AIB manufacturers to dish over that RDNA 4 compute. In fact, we all assumed an MBA design didn’t even exist, thanks to the words “artistic render: not available for purchase” underneath AMD’s GPU announcement post.

However, it looks like a Chinese forum-goer has actually got their hands on a reference RX 9070 XT. A post on Bilibili (via unikoshardware on X) shows a sctreen grab of what looks to be a Chiphell post displaying pictures of the reference design card all neatly packaged.

Well-known X user harukaze5719 also posted a picture of the card, which does indeed look like the same design as the “artistic render” AMD gave us, albeit in all black rather than silver and black. That “artistic render” design, by the way, is what we see in the image above which was also made by AMD (I’ve circled the cards in question—one presumably meant to be an RX 9070 and one presumably meant to be an RX 9070 XT).

The seeming MBA cards pictured by the Chinese forum-goer and on X are presumably prototypes as AMD has never mentioned the actual existence of any reference cards. Plus there’s the whole black vs silver-and-black thing (which is admittedly only definitely the case for the latter X post, as we’re not shown the front of the card in the Billibilli post).

Proper reference design graphics cards—ones that are made to be sold—are usually coveted for a couple of reasons: First, they have some ineffable air of officialness and rarity to them, and second, they always retail at MSRP.

So we’re always sad when there’s no reference version of a card, but it makes sense for AMD and Nvidia to keep costs down by delegating all production to AIBs, at least for some cards.

These cards, however, are likely engineering samples. Ones that apparently never made the grade to be produced en masse, or AMD decided against it during the initial testing. That’s happened before, plenty of times, like when Nvidia made a prototype RTX 4090 Ti with a massive cooler that someone found in a bin.

Still, it’s not too much of a loss, in my opinion, at least not compared to the lack of a Founders Edition of the RTX 5070 Ti, given Nvidia’s FE designs look genuinely gorgeous. The “artistic render” MBA RX 9070 XT, on the other hand, not so much—not awful, but not spectacular, either. Just one man’s opinion.

The real loss is the lack of another MSRP-priced card, and that’s something the existence of any prototype card won’t fix.