Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse Review

1. Introduction2. Meet the Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Time Spy Extreme5. Game Benchmarks6. Clock Speed7. GPU Temperatures8. Acoustics9. Noise-Normalised Temperatures10. Power Draw11. Overclocking12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

Following on from the recent launch of AMD's RX 7600 GPU, today we take a look at the Sapphire Pulse partner card. The Pulse series has firmly established itself as a bang-for-buck favourite since its inception in 2017 and that looks to be no different for this RX 7600 model. Hitting the market at £259.99, it's an MSRP card that offers a factory overclock, dual-fan cooler and metal backplate. Today we find out how it compares against AMD's reference design.

While the Sapphire Pulse lineup may not be quite so feature-packed as the more expensive Nitro+ series, you typically know what you are getting with a Pulse card – good build quality, an effective cooler and usually just a small price premium over the baseline MSRP. In this case, there's no price premium for the Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse model as it's on sale for £259.99, the same figure AMD quotes as the baseline MSRP for the RX 7600.

Today, we look at gaming performance, thermals, acoustics, overclocking and more to find out exactly how the Pulse compares to AMD's own reference card…

	RX 6700 XT	RX 6650 XT	RX 6600 XT	RX 6600	RX 7600
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 3
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	6nm
Transistor Count	17.2 billion	11.1 billion	11.1 billion	11.1 billion	13.3 billion
Die Size	336 mm²	237 mm²	237 mm²	237 mm²	204 mm²
Compute Units	40	32	32	28	32
Ray Accelerators	40	32	32	28	32
Stream Processors	2560	2048	2048	1792	2048
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2424MHz	Up to 2410MHz	Up to 2359MHz	Up to 2044 MHz	2250 MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2581MHz	Up to 2635MHz	Up to 2589MHz	Up to 2491MHz	Up to 2625MHz
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
AMD Infinity Cache	96MB	32MB	32MB	32MB	32MB
Memory	12GB GDDR6 16Gbps	8GB GDDR6 17.5Gbps	8GB GDDR6 16Gbps	8GB GDDR6 14Gbps	8GB GDDR6 18Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	384 GB/s	280 GB/s	256 GB/s	224 GB/s	288 GB/s
Memory Interface	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Board Power	230W	180W	160W	132W	165W

First, let's take a quick look at the specs. Still based on the RDNA 3 architecture, things are slightly different to what we saw with the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. For one, the chiplet-based design has reverted to a monolithic die, and instead of using TSMC's 5nm process, Navi 33 makes use of 6nm, with a 204 mm² die size.

Internally though, the compute makeup hasn't been radically changed. Navi 33 packs in 32 Compute Units, each of which houses 64 Stream Processors, for a total of 2048 shaders. There's also 32 Ray Accelerators – one per CU – and 64 ROPs.

As for clock speed, this remains high with the RX 7600, with AMD touting a boost of up to 2625MHz, though a slightly lower game clock of 2250MHz. Sapphire has increased this with the Pulse model, with a boost clock of 2755MHz, and a game clock rated at 2355MHz.

Meanwhile, the memory configuration is almost identical to the previous generation RX 6600. We still find 8GB GDDR6 operating over a 128-bit interface, but this time the memory clocks in at 18Gbps, up from 14Gbps. This gives a memory bandwidth of 288 GB/s, though AMD claims an ‘effective' bandwidth of 476.9 GB/s due to the 32MB of 2nd Gen Infinity cache.

As with Navi 23, Navi 33 also features a cut-down PCIe interface, offering a Gen4 x8 connection.

Power draw for the reference RX 7600 is rated at 165W Total Board Power (TBP), an increase from the 132W figure for the RX 6600. Sapphire is claiming a slightly higher 185W TBP for the Pulse model.

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