The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has been one of the most talked-about GPUs of 2026, and for good reason. Great performance, 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and a price point that embarrassed NVIDIA’s RTX 5070. But not everything is perfect in RDNA 4 land.
A new reliability report from French outlet Hardware & Co just dropped some uncomfortable truths about which specific models are giving users the most headaches.
Here’s the breakdown.
The PowerColor Reaper is the biggest red flag
The data comes from two major European retailers, Germany’s Mindfactory and Czech republic’s Alza, and it only counts warranty claims for confirmed hardware defects, not standard returns or buyer’s remorse cancellations. Any model with fewer than 100 units sold was excluded from the list.
The worst offender, and it’s not even close, is the PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper, which shows a 3.83% failure rate at Mindfactory across a sales bracket of over 1,660 units. To put that in perspective, that means roughly one in every 25 cards had a confirmed defect. Not great for a GPU that’s supposed to be a value champ.
To make things more complicated, Alza doesn’t carry PowerColor cards, so there’s no second retailer datapoint to cross-reference for that model. Whether that number holds up across other markets remains an open question.
ASRock’s flagship has a reliability problem too
Here’s where things get a little ironic. The ASRock RX 9070 XT Taichi is the company’s premium, top-of-the-line model, the one with the fancy triple-fan cooler, 16-phase power design, and the price to match.
And yet, the Taichi leads the complaint chart at Alza with a 2.53% failure rate, while Mindfactory recorded it at 1.25% across roughly 340 units sold.
Contrast that with the ASRock Challenger, the budget option from the same brand, which sits at just 0.22% at Mindfactory across more than 1,500 units. Same manufacturer, completely different reliability story. Sometimes the cheaper card is the safer bet.
Who comes out on top?
On the other end of the spectrum, a few models shine. The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT GAMING OC posted a 0.27% failure rate at Mindfactory and 0.49% at Alza, making it the least problematic GPU in the dataset. The ASUS PRIME OC also performed well, showing 0.22% at Mindfactory and 0.58% at Alza.
It’s worth noting that even the “worst” rates here are still relatively low in the grand scheme of consumer electronics. A 3.83% failure rate is definitely concerning, but it’s not like every Reaper is going to die on you.
Still, when you’re spending good money on a GPU in a market where prices have already climbed thanks to GDDR6 memory shortages, you want to pick the card that’s least likely to send you through an RMA process.
The data is limited to two European retailers, so take it with a grain of salt, Amazon and Newegg don’t publish this kind of metric publicly. But it’s one of the most honest reliability snapshots we’ve seen for this GPU generation, and it’s worth keeping in mind before you pull the trigger.
Got your own RX 9070 XT experience to share? Did yours hold up great or did you end up with a lemon? Drop it in the comments, we want to hear your story!