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).
The Sapphire RX 5700 XT ships in a red, white and grey box with prominent AMD branding in the bottom right corner. There's no image of the card itself on the front, but the Pulse logo is positioned in the top left corner of the box.
Inside, accessories are kept to a bare minimum, with a quick installation guide alongside a manufacturer's note.
As for the card itself, it looks like a conventional graphics card. The first thing I noticed about the shroud is its plastic construction which can feel quite flimsy in some areas, especially on the sides of the card. It's not the end of the world as once the card has been installed in your case, it doesn't matter so much – but it's not the best first impression for the Pulse.
While most of the shroud is black, there are also some silver and red accents on the card which I personally quite like, but it is interesting to see this approach given the older Pulse cards were entirely matte black. Most cards these days are moving towards entirely colour-neutral shrouds, and you can pick a colour of your choice via RGB lighting. Sapphire has bucked that trend somewhat with this design.
We also get a look at the two fans on the front of the card. These form part of the ‘Dual-X' cooler, and each fan measures 95mm across. As has become standard for Sapphire cards, the fans also support Quick Connect, which means each fan can be individually removed by taking out just one screw, which would make user repairs or RMAs significantly more straightforward.
On the sides of the card, we can see some exposed heatpipes – two running above the PCIe connector, and one on the opposite side.
It's also worth touching on dimensions of this card, as while it is not particularly long, it is quite tall – official dimensions come in at 254(L)x 135(W)x 46.5 (H)mm, so it's a good inch-or-so taller than the PCIe bracket itself. I would still expect this to fit in pretty much any mATX or ATX case, but it may be butting up slightly closer to your side panel than whatever card you have installed at the moment.
On the front side of the card, there is a relatively small Sapphire logo, just to the left of the exposed heatpipe. This is the sole RGB zone on the card, which you can control through Sapphire's TriXX software. At the time of writing, I was only given beta software which did not have any way of controlling the lighting, so it stayed a static red, but Sapphire is still working on the software and acknowledged it does not yet have all the expected features.
Just above the Sapphire logo, it is also worth pointing out the dual-BIOS switch. By default, the card ships with the ‘Boost' BIOS engaged, but you can enable the secondary ‘Silent' BIOS if you want.
As for the backplate, this is made from aluminium and covers the length of the card, with a cut-out behind the GPU-core. There's more grey and red accents here, with the ECG graph positioned on the left hand side which fits in with the Pulse name.
For power, the card requires 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs are provided via 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI ports.
Taking off the cooler we get a proper look at the PCB. This is a custom modified board, and while it may not be completely reworked versus the reference PCB, Sapphire hasn't just taken a reference design and slapped a cooler on it.
The most notable change is the to power delivery with Sapphire opting for a 7+2 phase design, meaning an extra phase for the GPU versus the reference board. As for the memory, the GDDR6 here is supplied by Micron, and each chip is labelled ‘9KA77D9WCW'. The relatively small Navi GPU is also on show, with no markings on the die itself.
As for the heatsink, this uses a single aluminium fin array with a total of 3 heatpipes, with each heatpipe measuring 6mm. There is also a copper coldplate to contact with the GPU die itself, while another coldplate is used to cool the VRAM chips. Lastly, one final coldplate is also positioned towards the right-hand side of the cooler, to cool the MOSFETs.
Our newest GPU test procedure has been built with the intention of benchmarking high-end graphics cards. We test at 1920×1080 (1080p), 2560×1440 (1440p), and 3840×2160 (4K UHD) resolutions.
We try to test using the DX12 API if titles offer support. This gives us an interpretation into the graphics card performance hierarchy in the present time and the near future, when DX12 becomes more prevalent. After all, graphics cards of this expense may stay in a gamer’s system for a number of product generations/years before being upgraded.
We tested the RX Vega64 and Vega56 using the ‘Turbo‘ power mode in AMD’s WattMan software. This prioritises all-out performance over power efficiency, noise output, and lower thermals.
Driver Notes
- All AMD graphics cards (except RX 5700/5700 XT) were benchmarked with the Adrenalin 19.6.2 driver.
- RX 5700/5700 XT reference were benchmarked with the 19.7.1 driver supplied to press ahead of launch. This Pulse card was tested with the 19.7.5 public driver.
- All Nvidia graphics cards (except 2060/2070/2080 SUPER) were benchmarked with the Nvidia 430.86 driver.
- Nvidia RTX 2060/2070 SUPER cards were benchmarked with the 431.16 driver supplied to press ahead of launch.
- Nvidia RTX 2080 SUPER cards were benchmarked with the 431.56 driver supplied to press ahead of launch.
Test System
We test using the Overclockers UK Germanium pre-built system, though it has been re-housed into an open-air test bench. You can read more about it over HERE.
CPU |
Intel Core i7-8700K
Overclocked to 4.8GHz |
Motherboard |
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming
|
Memory |
Team Group Dark Hawk RGB
16GB (2x8GB) @ 3200MHz 16-18-18-38 |
Graphics Card |
Varies
|
System Drive |
Samsung 960 EVO 500GB
|
Games Drive | Crucial M4 512GB |
Chassis | Streacom ST-BC1 Bench |
CPU Cooler |
OCUK TechLabs 240mm AIO
|
Power Supply |
Corsair AX1500i 80+ Titanium PSU
|
Operating System |
Windows 10 1903
|
Comparison Graphics Cards List
- Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition (FE) 11GB
- Nvidia RTX 2080 SUPER Founders Edition (FE) 8GB
- MSI RTX 2080 SUPER Gaming X Trio 8GB
- Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition (FE) 8GB
- Nvidia RTX 2070 SUPER Founders Edition (FE) 8GB
- Gigabyte RTX 2070 SUPER Gaming OC 8GB
- MSI RTX 2070 SUPER Gaming X Trio 8GB
- MSI RTX 2070 Armor 8GB
- Nvidia RTX 2060 SUPER Founders Edition (FE) 8GB
- Palit RTX 2060 SUPER JetStream (8GB)
- Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition (FE) 6GB
- Gigabyte GTX 1660 Ti OC 6G
- Gigabyte GTX 1660 Gaming OC 6G
- Palit GTX 1650 StormX OC 4GB
- Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition (FE) 11GB
- Gigabyte GTX 1080 G1 Gaming 8GB
- Palit GTX 1070 Ti Super JetStream 8GB
- Nvidia GTX 1070 Founders Edition (FE) 8GB
- Nvidia GTX 1060 Founders Edition (FE) 6GB
- AMD RX 5700 XT 8GB
- AMD RX 5700 8GB
- AMD Radeon VII 16GB
- AMD RX Vega 64 Air 8GB
- AMD RX Vega 56 8GB
- Sapphire RX 590 Nitro+ SE 8GB
- Sapphire RX 580 Pulse 8GB
- ASUS RX 570 ROG Strix Gaming OC 4GB
Software and Games List
- 3DMark Fire Strike & Fire Strike Ultra (DX11 Synthetic)
- 3DMark Time Spy (DX12 Synthetic)
- Battlefield V (DX12)
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (DX12)
- Far Cry 5 (DX11)
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands (DX11)
- Metro: Exodus (DX12)
- Middle Earth: Shadow of War (DX11)
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)
We run each benchmark/game three times, and present averages in our graphs.3DMark Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today’s high-performance gaming PCs. It is our [FutureMark’s] most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.
Based on the small increase in rated game clock for the Pulse card, 3DMark scores come in pretty much as expected with the Pulse 2% faster than reference RX 5700.
Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. Battlefield V is the sixteenth instalment in the Battlefield series. It was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 20, 2018. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Ultra preset with the DX12 API.
Battlefield V follows the initial trend we saw from 3DMark, with the Pulse RX 5700 again outperforming the reference card by 2% in this title. That is – at most – a difference of 3.5FPS at 1080p.Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is set in the year 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution and the “Aug Incident”—an event in which mechanically augmented humans became uncontrollable and lethally violent. Unbeknownst to the public, the affected augmented received implanted technology designed to control them by the shadowy Illuminati, which is abused by a rogue member of the group to discredit augmentations completely. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Very High preset, with MSAA disabled. We test using the DX12 API.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – along with Battlefield V – is one of our most AMD-friendly games and the RX 5700 outperforms the RTX 2060 SUPER across the board. We again see the Pulse card averaging 2% higher frame rates than AMD's reference design.
Far Cry 5 is an action-adventure first-person shooter game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is the eleventh entry and the fifth main title in the Far Cry series, and was released on March 27, 2018.
The game takes place in the fictional Hope County, Montana, where charismatic preacher Joseph Seed and his cult Project at Eden’s Gate holds a dictatorial rule over the area. The story follows an unnamed junior deputy sheriff, who becomes trapped in Hope County and works alongside factions of a resistance to liberate the county from Eden’s Gate. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Ultra preset, with AA and motion blur disabled.
Far Cry 5 has the 5700 neck-and-neck with RTX 2060 SUPER, and yep – you guessed it, the Pulse is on average 2% faster than the reference design in this title.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is a tactical shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Paris and published by Ubisoft. It was released worldwide on March 7, 2017, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as the tenth instalment in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise and is the first game in the Ghost Recon series to feature an open world environment. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Very High preset.
The 2060 SUPER is marginally faster than the RX 5700 Pulse in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but we're only talking a couple frames at 1080p and 1440p. The Pulse itself is a similar margin ahead of the reference 5700.
Metro Exodus is a first-person shooter video game developed by 4A Games and published by Deep Silver in 2019. It is the third instalment in the Metro video game series based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels, following the events of Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. (Wikipedia)
We test using the Ultra preset, but with Hairworks and Advanced PhysX turned off. We test using the DX12 API.
Metro Exodus continues our trend of ‘small margins', with the Pulse outperforming its reference cousin by less than 2FPS at 1440p.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 10, 2017. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Very High preset.
In Middle Earth: Shadow of War, we actually see the biggest performance increase for the Pulse over the reference card, as at 4K the Pulse outperforms the reference design by 7%. It sounds like a decent improvement, but at this resolution it works out to a difference of just 3.7FPS.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series. The game released worldwide on 14 September 2018 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. (Wikipedia).
We test using the Highest preset, with AA disabled. We test using the DX12 API.
Our last game on test today pretty much sums up overall performance of this card perfectly – with the Pulse RX 5700 coming in 2% faster than AMD's reference card.As you will know, TriXX is Sapphire's software suite for overclocking and setting RGB lighting. With the new generation of cards from AMD, Sapphire has re-worked this tool and while it's not yet 100% finished we were sent an early development version for use with this card.
The main thing we want to look at here is a new feature called TriXX Boost. This essentially lets you downsample your games, up to 70% of your native resolution, to increase performance. This works hand-in-hand with Radeon Image Sharpening, a new feature of the Navi GPUs, which can be enabled and disabled within TriXX.
So, in a nutshell, TriXX Boost isn't necessarily anything new that Sapphire has developed – resolution scaling has been available in some games for years. What it does do, is give users an easy way to set a custom resolution scale for all games instead of those which support the feature already.
Below, we tested two titles at native 4K, and then again with a custom 90% resolution scale with Radeon Image Sharpening enabled, to see the performance uplift.
As you can see, setting a 90% resolution scale results in a decent performance uplift – around 17-19% based on this testing. From a visual perspective, too, I have to be honest and say I couldn't really tell the difference between native 4K and a 90% scale with Radeon Image Sharpening enabled.
Like I said, this isn't something new that Sapphire has pioneered – you can find other ways to downsample games without TriXX, and many games even let you do this direct from the video settings. Simply put, this just makes the process easier for games which don't support downsampling already.
Here we present the average clock speed for each graphics card while running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. We use GPU-Z to record the GPU core frequency during the Fire Strike Ultra runs. We calculate the average core frequency during the entire 20-run test to present here.
In terms of on-paper specs, reference RX 5700 has a rated game clock of 1625MHz, and the RX 5700 Pulse has a rated game clock of 1700MHz. While the reference card did exceed its rated game clock by around 30MHz, the Pulse averaged 1705MHz, putting it pretty much bang on with its rated clock speed. This gives it a 3% frequency advantage over the reference card, tying in very neatly with the small performance gains we saw from this card in our games testing.For our temperature testing, we measure the peak GPU core temperature under load, as well as the GPU temperature with the card idling on the desktop. A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes.
Thermal performance, along with acoustics, is likely one of the biggest reasons you would consider spending extra on a custom RX 5700 graphics card. We can certainly see the benefit of doing so, as our Pulse ran 6C cooler than the reference design, with the GPU peaking at 71C during our testing. As this is our first custom Navi review, we don't yet have a wider context for how good this is compared to other custom cards, but it's certainly a good improvement over reference.
Our thermal gun didn't show any areas of concern on the card, either. The area on the PCB just behind the GPU core reached just over 66C, with the front side of the card peaking at around 58C. So nothing at all to worry about there.
We take our noise measurements with the sound meter positioned 1 foot from the graphics card. I measured the noise floor to be 32 dBA, thus anything above this level can be attributed to the graphics cards. The power supply is passive for the entire power output range we tested all graphics cards in, while all CPU and system fans were disabled.
A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes.
Noise testing shows the single biggest improvement the Pulse makes over the reference card, as its runs about 10dB quieter when under load. This may not make it the absolute quietest card we've ever tested, but it is significantly quieter than reference and is still far from annoying in terms of total noise output. Essentially, you will be able to hear the fans gently whirring away while gaming, but nothing more than that.
Just to give some extra context for these results, these readings under load came with the Pulse RX 5700 running its fans at at 44%, or 1430rpm. When idling, the fans stop spinning completely.
We measure system-wide power draw from the wall while the card is sat idling at the Windows 10 desktop for 30 minutes. A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times.
Our power testing did not present any surprises, with the Pulse card drawing 3W more than the reference card based on our testing. That makes it an effective tie, as practically speaking that extra 3W is just not going to make a difference in the real world.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%.
The first custom RX 5700 to come through our doors, Sapphire's Pulse card is an all-together solid improvement over the reference design.
Starting with the overall look and design, it's a pretty conventional dual-fan cooler which Sapphire calls ‘Dual-X'. It uses two 95mm fans and a mostly black plastic shroud. It's certainly not the most premium feeling graphics card, with the plastic shroud proving quite flimsy, but I suppose once it's in your case it doesn't matter too much.
The red and silver/grey colour accents may not be to everyone's taste, though. Over the last couple of years, we've seen manufacturers move away from coloured shrouds to more colour-neutral designs, and then you can use RGB lighting if you want to match the card to a particular colour scheme in your build. With the Pulse series, it could potentially be limiting its appeal by going with this fixed colour scheme. Personally I think it's a good looking card, but whether or not it will match with your own rig is another matter.
Anyway, there's no doubt the cooler performs much better than the reference design in terms of its temperature and noise levels. Core temperature dropped 6C versus reference, while noise levels also fell from 52 to 42dB. Both are clear improvements, but it really is the lower noise levels which I most appreciate – a 10dB drop in total noise output is very significant, and means this card is much easier on the ears than the reference model.
The Pulse is also faster than AMD's reference design, but not by much – we saw very consistent frame rate increases of 2% across our testing, while the biggest improvement proved to be just 7% at 4K. This does actually push the Sapphire card ahead of the RTX 2060 SUPER, as the Pulse is on average 1% faster – though do bear in mind that figure does mask some fairly dramatic swings across our suite of games.
Versus the vanilla RTX 2060, the Pulse increases its lead to 15% on average, and it is faster than that card across every single game we tested. As a last comparison against the Radeon VII, the Pulse is still 14% slower, though it's also about half the price that the Radeon VII launched at.
Closing out with a look at pricing, here we see the unfortunate effects of a weak Pound versus the US dollar, as Sapphire confirmed pricing to us at £365 for the Pulse RX 5700, but in the States it will cost $359. That makes it just $10 more than reference (+3%), and at that price it is an absolute no-brainer – I'd pay that premium over the reference card any day of the week for the lower temperatures and significantly reduced noise levels.
For those of us in the UK, however, the card comes in £36 more expensive than reference, which is an 11% increase. I think that price is still worth paying for the improvements this card makes, but it is certainly not as attractive as a mere $10 price increase, and it does make me wonder how other custom cards will be priced. Pulse, after all, is Sapphire's lower-end series, and the higher the pricing goes for other custom Navi cards, the trickier things become when up against the 2060 and 2070 SUPER.
Even taking that into account, I can still recommend the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse. If you're in the USA this is a fantastic value card, and while the pricing is less attractive for UK buyers it is still a solid offering and will do a noticeably better job than the reference design.
You can buy the RX 5700 Pulse from Overclockers UK for £364.99 HERE.
Pros
- Runs 6C cooler than reference.
- 10dB quieter than reference.
- Small (3%) increase to clock speed.
- Full length aluminium backplate.
- Quick Connect fans makes self-repair easy.
Cons
- Shroud feels flimsy in areas.
- UK pricing is less favourable than US pricing.
KitGuru says: Sapphire's RX 5700 is a solid first effort and improves on the reference design in every way. UK buyers do pay more of a price-premium than shoppers in the USA, but even then I'd say it is worth the extra cash.
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