SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT Pulse 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. The Division 2 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. F1 2019 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Gears 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)13. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)14. Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, 1440p, 4K)15. Clock Speed16. Temperatures17. Acoustics18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking: Frequency and Games20. Overclocking: Temperatures, Acoustics, Power21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Back in August, we got our first look at a custom Navi graphics card in the form of Sapphire's RX 5700 Pulse. It has been a long time coming since then, but today we are able to present our review of the RX 5700 XT Pulse. Despite the immediate visual similarities between the 5700 and 5700 XT Pulse cards, they do actually use different coolers, so if you want to spend around £400 on your next GPU, is this a card to consider?

It's been a fascinating year for graphics cards. With AMD's RX 5700 series going head-to-head with the Nvidia RTX SUPER series, it's funny to think those cards launched almost half a year ago. In that time, pricing has changed somewhat and this Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT can now be found for £395, when at launch the card was £30 more expensive. That means, compared to the MSRP price of £379, the Pulse comes with just a 4% price premium over the blower-style reference card, when at launch the price premium was 12%.

For that extra cash over the reference card, we are getting a dual-fan cooler, on-board dual-BIOS and also increased clock speeds, with a rated game clock of up to 1815MHz. Is the Pulse worth buying? Read on to find out.

	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 XT, the GPU is based on TSMC’s 7nm process and is made up of 40 Compute Units, each housing 64 Stream Processors for a total of 2560 shaders. Alongside that, the card is outfitted with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, operating over a 256-bit bus for 448GB/s total memory bandwidth.

As mentioned above, the Pulse does come with a slight factory overclock, with its rated game clock of 1815MHz giving it a 60MHz advantage over the reference card. Sapphire's Nitro+ should remain the faster card due to its game clock of 1905MHz, while the ASRock Taichi should be faster still with a 1935MHz game clock.

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