AMD RX 7700 XT Review ft. Sapphire Pulse

1. Introduction2. Meet the Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Cyberpunk 20778. Forza Horizon 59. God of War10. Horizon Zero Dawn11. The Last of Us Part 112. A Plague Tale: Requiem13. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart14. Red Dead Redemption 215. Resident Evil 416. Returnal17. Total War: Warhammer III18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Bonus Benchmark: Starfield21. Ray Tracing: Control22. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207723. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive24. Ray Tracing: F1 2325. Ray Tracing: Hitman 326. Ray Tracing: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart27. Ray Tracing: Returnal28. Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider29. Ray Tracing Performance Summary30. Clock Speed31. GPU Temperatures32. Acoustics33. Power Draw: 1080p34. Power Draw: 1440p35. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)36. Performance per Watt: 1080p37. Performance per Watt: 1440p38. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)39. Total System Power Draw40. Closing Thoughts41. View All Pages

The Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pulse ships in a bright purple box, with a large AMD Radeon logo and 7700 XT branding in the bottom corner. Inside, the only included accessory was a short quick installation guide.

As for the design of the card, it's very reminiscent of the RX 7900 XT Pulse I recently used in a 44-game benchmark. Its shroud is made of mostly black plastic, though there are a few red accents which tie in with the Pulse colour scheme.

We can also note the dual fan cooler, using Sapphire's Angular Velocity Fan Blades, while each fan measures in at 100mm in diameter.

The Pulse is slightly larger than the RX 7800 XT reference card, with the following official dimensions provided by Sapphire: 280 x 128.75 x  52.57mm. It's by no means huge and should still fit in pretty much any mid-tower chassis these days. It weighs in at just over 1KG on my scales.

The side of the card is home to the Radeon and Sapphire logos, again coloured red. We can also note the full-length metal backplate, with the Pulse branding and an ECG printed in red – a staple of the Pulse series throughout the years.

Despite marginally lower power requirements than the RX 7800 XT, power is still delivered by two 8-pin connectors.

Display outputs consist of 2x HDMI 2.1 and 2x DisplayPort 2.1, so there's an extra HDMI but one less DisplayPort than what we usually see.

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