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Having reviewed a couple of new AMD RX 500-series cards on launch day, we are supplementing those initial reviews with a look at Sapphire's RX 570 Pulse 4GB card. The Pulse series is a new addition to Sapphire's line-up, and essentially it is meant to offer the quality of Sapphire graphics cards at lower prices by ditching some of the extra, potentially superfluous features that the Nitro+ family include.
Personally I think this is very smart, as if Sapphire can deliver a strong graphics card that performs well and costs less than the competition, then it is surely onto a winner. In this review, we benchmark the Sapphire RX 570 Pulse 4GB against the competition in a number of the latest games and synthetic tests before offering our final verdict.
| GPU | AMD RX 480 | AMD RX 580 | AMD RX 470 | AMD RX 570 | AMD R9 390 |
Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti | Nvidia GTX 1060 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors / Compute Units |
36 | 36 | 32 | 32 | 40 | 6 | 10 |
| GPU Cores | 2304 | 2304 | 2048 | 2048 | 2560 | 768 | 1280 |
| Texture Units | 144 | 144 | 128 | 128 | 160 | 48 | 80 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 64 | 32 | 48 |
| Base Clock | 1120 MHz | 1257 MHz | 926 MHz | 1168 MHz | Up to 1000MHz | 1290 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1266 MHz | 1340 MHz | 1206 MHz | 1244 MHz | Up to 1000MHz | 1392 MHz | 1708 MHz |
| Total Video memory | 4096 or 8192 MB | 4096 or 8192 MB | 4096 or 8192 MB | 4096 MB | 8192 MB | 4096 MB | 6144 MB |
| Memory Clock (Effective) |
1750 (7000) or 2000 (8000) MHz | 2000 (8000) MHz | 1650 (6600) MHz | 1750 (7000) MHz | 1500 (6000) MHz | 1752 (7008) MHz | 2002 (8008) MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 224 or 256 GB/s | 256 GB/s | 211 GB/s | 224 GB/s | 384 GB/s | 112 GB/s | 192 GB/s |
| Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 512-bit | 128-bit | 192-bit |
| Manufacturing Process | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 28nm | 16nm | 16nm |
| TDP | 150 W | 185 W | 120 W | 150 W | 275 W | 75W | 120 W |
This Sapphire RX 570 does come with a slight factory overclock, at 1284 MHz (a 27 MHz increase over reference speeds).
It is also worth noting some of the features that the Pulse cards do not have. When compared to the Nitro+ series, features that are lacking include:
- Extra LED fans
- Dual-BIOS functionality
- RGB Sapphire logo
- NITRO Boost
- NITRO FanCheck
- NITRO CoolTech (NCT)
- Robust VRM cooling
Clearly, the Pulse cards are designed to ‘just work', so the performance of this RX 570 in games and benchmarks will go a long way to determining whether or not it is worth buying.
Excellent review; and it would be nice to see you you could label the release year of the games you use for benchmarking, as point of reference as well.