Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ Review

The third RX 7800 XT partner card to pass through our doors, today we have assessed the Sapphire Nitro+, and it is another quality design from the company.

For me, as good as the cooler is, I think the Nitro+'s best feature is its visual appearance. It's just a sexy graphics card – I'm not sure how else I can describe it! Sure, if you don't care what your PC looks like, it may not be the card for you, but even just having this in for review makes me want to build a bespoke rig to show it off in all its glory.

The beauty's not just skin-deep though, as the cooler is very effective. Out of the box we saw it run at just 62C, while fan speeds are incredibly low regardless of which BIOS you are using. It may not be quite so efficient as the PowerColor Hellhound when noise-normalised, but this cooler is more than good enough to effectively deal with the 290W load.

Actual gaming performance is about as expected, with 2-3% gains over the reference RX 7800 XT. Overclocking the Nitro+ proved very fruitful though, with further gains in the 11-12% region once the card was at its limit, so that's well worth doing provided you are happy with increasing power draw by another 50W.

In terms of pricing then, Sapphire communicated to us before the launch that the Nitro+ will have a £529 MSRP, however it is currently retailing for more than that. At the time of writing, Scan has it for £539.99 while it's £559.99 at OCUK. That does put the Nitro+ rather closer to the RTX 4070 than I'd like, with 4070s starting for £569.99 these days – and that GPU is more efficient, offers better ray tracing performance and all the benefits of DLSS 2/3.

However, it is worth considering that while RTX 4070s start at £570, the cards at that price are very cut-down in terms of their features and coolers, while visually they really are no match for the allure of the Nitro+. A proper RTX 4070 equivalent to the Nitro+ would be something like the Gigabyte Aero, and that's about £100 more expensive.

With that in mind, we can still recommend the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ as it's a cracking card with a jaw-dropping design. Its current pricing does put it slightly too close to the RTX 4070 for comfort, but we are sure many would still opt for the Nitro+ over a much more basic entry-level RTX 4070.

You can buy the Nitro+ for £539.99 from Scan while it's £559.99 at Overclockers UK.

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Pros

• Beautiful aesthetic.
• Whisper quiet in either BIOS mode.
• Runs cool even at very low noise levels.
• Overclocked very well.
• Dual-BIOS.
• Additional 4-pin PWM fan header.
• Option to control ARGB lighting via your motherboard.

Cons

• Pricing at £540+ does bring it close to the RTX 4070.
• PowerColor Hellhound is superior in terms of noise-normalised thermals.

KitGuru says: It's one of the best-looking graphics cards I've ever seen and it performs very well, too. Hopefully an increase in availability will bring pricing closer to the £529 MSRP.

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