Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT

amazon Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT reviews

General introduction

Sapphire Pulse is the first custom version of the RX 5700 XT Navi series. Sapphire’s Pulse line of cards is positioned as a near-premium segment, ranked right below the Nitro line. The RX 5700 XT Pulse combines a custom board and AMD’s default VRM. In addition, the card is also equipped with dual BIOS technology and a fan stop feature when running light tasks.

Radeon RX 5700 XT and the first performance segment card in more than 2 years since the RX Vega series, based on 7nm Navi architecture. This line of cards is intended to compete with the RTX 2070 in the same price segment of $600, forcing NVIDIA to launch the RTX 2070 Super in response. Then, AMD reduced the price of the RX 5700 XT to the $500 segment to compete with the RTX 2060 Super, and this time NVIDIA didn’t do anything to respond.

At the heart of the card is a 10nm Navi GPU with 10.3 billion transistors on a 251mm2 silicon base. AMD also equips 256-bit GDDR6 memory to reduce costs compared to equipping HBM2 memory like on Vega 20 cards. At a 14Gbps memory clock, Navi has a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. RX 5700 XT uses PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface with backward compatibility, but optimally, you should install it with AMD Ryzen 3000 and X570 Mainboard. The terms 7nm and PCIe 4.0 are also repeated many times in AMD’s marketing campaign, implying that this line of cards is ahead of NVIDIA Turing which is built on a 12nm process and uses PCIe 3.0 interface.

The Sapphire Pulse version of the Radeon RX 5700 XT has a custom circuit board with a 7+2 power phase, and the boost clock is also overclocked to 1925 MHz. The aluminum heatsinks are arranged in a fin-stack form and a pair of fans can stop spinning when the card is not hot.

Boxes and accessories

The box of Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT is quite simple when only recording the recommended features and configuration to install with the card. Accessories are also nothing but manuals.

Hardware analysis

Sapphire uses red motifs that simulate a heartbeat on a silver background combined with black. The card size is 25.5 x 13.5 cm.

The card is a bit thicker than 2 PCIe slots, so when installed, it will take up 3 PCIe slots in the case. This version of the RX 5700 XT has three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and one HDMI 2.0b port.

This card requires an 8-pin power source and a 6-pin power source, so the card can pull an additional 300W of power.

AMD’s Navi generation no longer supports CrossFire. This is also not a point unless DirectX 12 on the card also supports multi-GPU and not many games and software support this feature.

In this corner, you can also see the switch between the two BIOSes, by default this switch will be in Boost mode – increasing performance in exchange for more noise, and the other is Silent – quiet operation rather than trade-off performance.

Sapphire used a copper base with 5 heat pipes to effectively dissipate heat for the RX 5700XT Pulse.

Removing the main heatsink we can immediately see the secondary heatsink for the memory chip and VRM. The VRM part consists of 7 phases, controlled by the Rectifier IR35217 controller, one of the best controllers on the market. Power for the memory uses a 2-phase design and is controlled by the NCP81022 controller.

Performance test

Hardware to run the test

CPU: Core i9-9900K @ 5 GHz

Mainboard: EVGA Z390 DARK

RAM: 16 GB DDR4 @ 3867 MHz 18-19-19-39

SSD: 2 x 960GB

Source: Cryorig R1 Universal

Windows 10 Professional 64-bit Version 1809

Battlefield DRAW

Battlefield V is EA’s latest shooter running the Frostbite 3 engine. Both DirectX 11 and Direct X 12 as well as Raytracing technology is supported by this game. In this test, we use DirectX 11 which is used by more gamers.

Devil May Cry 5

This is a hack-and-slash game from Japan that runs the Resident Evil engine in the games of the same name. Using DirectX 11, this game is not too close to the hardware.

Hitman 2

This is a killer game about agent 47, when it was released, Hitman 2 didn’t support DirectX 12 but was later updated and we used that version for testing.

Metro Exodus

4A Games’ latest shooting game uses the 4A engine and supports Ray-tracing and DLSS. Although the game does use the DirectX 12 API’s DXR, we do not enable it and Ray-tracing to ensure playability.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

A popular game in HNC’s tests, this Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT has no difficulty in Full HD and 2K resolution, at 4K it can still be called playable, but not smooth.

Far Cry 5

Another familiar game in HNC’s tests, using the Dunia engine and DirectX 11 so this game is quite easy for the RX 5700 XT to conquer at 4K resolution.

Power consumption

The power consumption of Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT in idle state (no load) is the same as AMD’s reference, but power consumption when playing games and running Furmark is higher than 20W, which is understandable when the level The pulse of the Sapphire Pulse is much higher. With the highest power consumption of 253W, Biareview recommends that you use a real power source of 500W or more to run this card.

Fan temperature and noise

Perhaps this is the part you are most looking forward to when AMD’s reference RX 5700 XT has a very hot temperature, so what will be the temperature under Sapphire’s customization?

The no-load temperature of Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT is 49 degrees, and the maximum temperature of 76 degrees is within the cool threshold of the graphics card and is much cooler than 92 degrees in AMD’s reference version. In addition, Sapphire’s version also has a significantly lower noise level and is only around 35 dBA, at this level only when the surrounding space is very quiet, usually at night, you will hear the small fan.

where can you get a Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT online

Sapphire Technology 11293-09-20G Radeon PULSE RX 5700 XT BE 8GB GDDR6 HDMI / Triple DP OC w/ Backplate (UEFI) PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card: Buy it now