Sapphire RX 570 Pulse Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 570 Pulse 4GB3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark (1080p and 1440p)5. SteamVR Performance Test6. Unigine Heaven (1080p and 1440p)7. Ashes of the Singularity (1080p and 1440p)8. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p and 1440p)9. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p and 1440p)10. Grand Theft Auto V (1080p and 1440p)11. Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p and 1440p)12. Noise13. Power Consumption14. Temperatures15. Overclocking16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

Having reviewed a couple of new AMD RX 500-series cards on launch day, we are supplementing those initial reviews with a look at Sapphire's RX 570 Pulse 4GB card. The Pulse series is a new addition to Sapphire's line-up, and essentially it is meant to offer the quality of Sapphire graphics cards at lower prices by ditching some of the extra, potentially superfluous features that the Nitro+ family include.

Personally I think this is very smart, as if Sapphire can deliver a strong graphics card that performs well and costs less than the competition, then it is surely onto a winner. In this review, we benchmark the Sapphire RX 570 Pulse 4GB against the competition in a number of the latest games and synthetic tests before offering our final verdict.

GPU	AMD RX 480	AMD RX 580	AMD RX 470	AMD RX 570	AMD R9 390	Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti	Nvidia GTX 1060
Streaming Multiprocessors / Compute Units	36	36	32	32	40	6	10
GPU Cores	2304	2304	2048	2048	2560	768	1280
Texture Units	144	144	128	128	160	48	80
ROPs	32	32	32	32	64	32	48
Base Clock	1120 MHz	1257 MHz	926 MHz	1168 MHz	Up to 1000MHz	1290 MHz	1506 MHz
GPU Boost Clock	1266 MHz	1340 MHz	1206 MHz	1244 MHz	Up to 1000MHz	1392 MHz	1708 MHz
Total Video memory	4096 or 8192 MB	4096 or 8192 MB	4096 or 8192 MB	4096 MB	8192 MB	4096 MB	6144 MB
Memory Clock (Effective)	1750 (7000) or 2000 (8000) MHz	2000 (8000) MHz	1650 (6600) MHz	1750 (7000) MHz	1500 (6000) MHz	1752 (7008) MHz	2002 (8008) MHz
Memory Bandwidth	224 or 256 GB/s	256 GB/s	211 GB/s	224 GB/s	384 GB/s	112 GB/s	192 GB/s
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	512-bit	128-bit	192-bit
Manufacturing Process	14nm	14nm	14nm	14nm	28nm	16nm	16nm
TDP	150 W	185 W	120 W	150 W	275 W	75W	120 W

This Sapphire RX 570 does come with a slight factory overclock, at 1284 MHz (a 27 MHz increase over reference speeds).

It is also worth noting some of the features that the Pulse cards do not have. When compared to the Nitro+ series, features that are lacking include:

• Extra LED fans
• Dual-BIOS functionality
• RGB Sapphire logo
• NITRO Boost
• NITRO FanCheck
• NITRO CoolTech (NCT)
• Robust VRM cooling

Clearly, the Pulse cards are designed to ‘just work', so the performance of this RX 570 in games and benchmarks will go a long way to determining whether or not it is worth buying.

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