Sapphire RX 5700 PULSE 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 5700 Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Sapphire TriXX Boost13. Clock Speed14. Temperatures15. Acoustics16. Power Consumption17. Overclocking18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

AMD's Navi-based RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics cards launched last month, and we received them very favourably with both cards coming in faster than their Nvidia counterparts at the same price. The major letdown was, of course, the reference cooler, so we have been eagerly waiting for custom cards to see what they can do. Well, the wait is over as we can now present our review of Sapphire's RX 5700 Pulse!

Ditching the blower-style cooler for a traditional dual-fan design, Sapphire's RX 5700 Pulse should hopefully offer improved temperatures and acoustics versus the reference card. It is worth pointing that Pulse is a more entry-level family, designed to offer solid performance without much in the way of added frills or extras which can drive the price up. We are expecting to see Nitro cards from Sapphire as well, but at the moment we are still waiting for details about those cards.

As for the price, AMD's RX 5700 has a MSRP of £329 and reference cards have been available at – or just above – those prices pretty much since the initial launch on July 7. Sapphire has confirmed to us that the 5700 Pulse will cost £365, with Overclockers UK also listing the card at that price. This makes the Pulse £36 more expensive than the MSRP, an 11% increase.

	RX 5700	RX 5700 XT	RX Vega 56	RX Vega 64	Radeon VII
Architecture	Navi	Navi	Vega 10	Vega 10	Vega 20
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	14nm	14nm	7nm
Transistor Count	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	12.5 billion	12.5 billion	13.2 billion
Die Size	251mm²	251mm²	486mm²	495mm²	331mm²
Compute Units	36	40	56	64	60
Stream Processors	2304	2560	3584	4096	3840
Base GPU Clock	Up to 1465MHz	Up to 1605MHz	1156 MHz	1274 MHz	1400 MHz
Game GPU Clock	Up to 1625MHz	Up to 1755MHz	n/a	n/a	n/a
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 1725MHz	Up to 1905MHz	1471 MHz	1546 MHz	1750 MHz
Peak Engine Clock	n/a	n/a	1590 MHz	1630 MHz	1800 MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 10.5 TFLOPS	Up to 12.7 TFLOPS	Up to 14.2 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 21.0 TFLOPS	Up to 25.3 TFLOPS	Up to 28.1 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 248.4 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 330.0 GT/s	Up to 395.8 GT/s	432.24 GT/s
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 110.4 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 94.0 GP/s	Up to 98.9 GP/s	115.26 GP/s
Memory	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB HBM	8GB HBM	16GB HBM2
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	410 GB/s	483.8 GB/s	1 TB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit	4096-bit
Board Power	185W	225W	210W	295W	300W

To recap the core spec of the RX 5700, the card is a cut-down version of the new Navi 10 GPU with 36 Compute Units (CUs) and 2304 stream processors. The GPU itself is fabbed on TSMC's 7nm process and has a small die size of 251mm².

For clock speeds, Sapphire has pushed things a little bit, with a rated game clock of 1700MHz – 75MHz higher than reference speed. Remember, the ‘game clock' isn't a guaranteed figure but should be representative of the speeds the GPU is able to achieve while gaming. This is something we test later in the review.

Lastly, 8GB of GDDR6 memory is provided with the RX 5700, operating at 14Gbps over a 256-bit bus. These are actually exactly the same memory modules as found on Nvidia's Turing-based RTX cards (bar the 2080 SUPER).

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