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

Unfortunately, overclocking the RX 5700 did not prove to be a fun, or particularly fruitful, experience. We said the same thing on our launch-day review for the reference 5700 and I was hoping a month's worth of driver improvements would have helped, but it does not seem so.

In a nutshell, no matter what settings I tried, we did not see much improvement to our game performance. It's easy to max the power limit, set the core clock to 1850MHz (its maximum value) and get perfect stability – but, in many cases, that would actually cause performance to decrease slightly. Just being able to dial in the maximum overclock doesn't seem to mean anything with the 5700, as in-game performance doesn't benefit as a result.

In the end, after a lot of trial and error, the best increases I saw to our frame rates came by setting a core clock of 1815MHz, maxing the power limit and setting the fans set to 80% (as above). Memory overclocking is especially poor, with anything above 900MHz causing artifacting.

This saw a real-world frequency increase of 71MHz (+4.4%), which is OK but nothing fantastic.

At the end of the day, all that effort gave us an extra 2-4% in game – barely 2-3FPS at 1440p – which hardly seems worth it, especially as this was with the fans ramped up to 80%.

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