Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “7900 XT Sapphire Pulse, better than Reference?”.
I have here something very special: the sapphire RX 7900 XT, there’s no X, we’re short at X and four gigabytes of memory as it turns out, but let’s unbox, ah quick installation guide and a support bracket, the support bracket, installation guide because, of course, look at that. That’S a nice aluminum, aluminum support bracket, all right and some big old screws, three big old screws, as a matter of fact for the thick installation bracket and it’s not super heavy. If I were an oem, I would feel comfortable shipping this card in shipping, because it’s not super insanely heavy we’ve got dual 8-pin power, connectors no power, connector Insanity here and a very heavy thick copper base plate on the bottom. I can see that immediately. We have three replaceable pulse fans.
You can see the Phillips screws that make it easy to remove and service those fans and at the back, we’ve got two DisplayPort 2.1 54 gigabit and two HDMI 2.1 ports. This card looks like it also has some built-in anti-sag reinforcement. It is a tall card, so you’ll need a wider case. It looks like we’ve got five heat pipes at the back.
That’S a very long card. That’S a very impressive card. Let’S put it to the test. Now, in the 7900 XT launched it paled next to the XTX, the XTX was significantly more performance for only marginally more cost.
Well, things have moved on a little bit since the launch of the XTX and the XT from AMD. The pricing has settled down a little bit, dare I say, gone down just a bit and that doesn’t seem to have negatively impacted Sapphire’s offering at all the build quality on this is Top Notch. The fit and finish is Top Notch. The bundle with the included. You know anti-sag bracket, even though this is not the flagship card. This is the Nitro plus. This is what Sapphire I mean you got. Ta know.
Sapphire Nitro plus, is the card configuration that is sort of the one that they say is like we’re going to give you everything you need everything to make sense and we’re not gon na you know overdo it, there’s not an insane amount of RGB. We didn’t go overkill on the fans, we didn’t go overkill on the cooling, but this will give you a good Radeon 7000 series experience without being Overkill. That’S that’s Sapphire. They have a very good reputation here. So, let’s break down the performance. Now the results from Sapphire for this card are much more interesting than I thought that they would be. You see, I’ve got the 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT reference, courtesy of AMD that I use for my initial launch. Testing and I’ve been running those cards pretty much continuously on Linux, not on Linux, on Windows, the driver updates and then through Vapor chamber gate and my cards don’t seem to be affected.
So I okay, fun fun, interesting things. Now this card from Sapphire is a non-reference design. They’Ve done their own cooler, they’ve done their own power tuning. They let the card sort of do some interesting things. When I reviewed the 7900 XT, I thought that it was an awful lot slower for only a hundred dollars price difference. Is this a marketing strategy? You know it’s like the Halo product is only a hundred dollars more just splurge and get it because yeah the card’s 100 more, but if you’re upgrading the entire rest of your system, as you should be to not get bottlenecks unless you’ve got a really recent system. In which case, why did you buy a crappy GPU when you bought your system uh, the 100 price difference is, is negligible, given the overall cost is hovering around a thousand dollars plus or minus well, what Sapphire has done here much to my surprise, is split. The difference between the reference XT and the reference XTX yeah, the 7900 XT from Sapphire the pulse too.
This is not like a toxic addition, because Sapphire has their toxic versions which are really nice and I’m looking for the toxic XTX, but the pulse XT. Here has closed the Gap, it’s it’s performing Head and Shoulders better than the reference 7900 XT, and it’s pretty much 50 of the way out of the box between the reference XT and the reference XTX. So, depending on what the pricing is, that could be a much more compelling option. Just you know: do the calculus look at the cost of an XTX in your market and look at where you’re Landing in terms of performance? Overall, the landscape with these AMD cards is unless you really got your heart set on top shelf Ray tracing performance.
These are the cards to buy hands down. You know if it’s a choice between a 4080 and a 7900 XT. The choice is pretty easy. It’S a 7900 XT! It’S going to be way better in raster performance.
It’S got 20 Gigabytes of vram. There are a few titles where Nvidia pulls ahead, but not hugely, and we’ve also seen driver improvements as well. In fact, I went back and retested the 7900 XT the reference Edition just to be sure that it maintained the Gap and yeah. It did.
I’M not really sure if I just got super lucky silicon Lottery, the power usage and the power draw out of the box from the 7900 pulse. Xt was about 40 to 50 Watts. At the wall higher in Peak scenarios, not averages. The averages was not significant, but the peak power draw was a little bit better, so I got to figure that the improved cooling plus you know Sapphire making some tweaks to let the card burst a little higher, improves performance and another data point for that hypothesis.
Is our 0.1 percent lows? If you, I really want to start recalculating how we do one percent lows and 0.1 percent lows, because the tools will capture point one percent lows, but I kind of want to weight them a little differently than we’re doing now. That’S a whole other conversation, maybe that’s a different video, but for just 0.1 percent lows, things are significantly improved on the 7900 XT over the reference cards and I got ta figure that that’s because of the thermal Headroom and that sort of thing, maybe the wattage, that The card isn’t hitting some sort of hard limit and backing off and causing a micro stutter. It doesn’t happen often enough to be off-putting, while you’re actually gaming, but over the long term, especially when you’re playing a super unoptimized game like seven days to die. It is noticeable it’s also noticeable when the windows has downloaded an update against your will in the background, because because the game sort of starts being a little bit stuttery and unresponsive, and then it’s like wait, all the benchmarks are wrecked, and then you have to reboot And it’s like, oh yeah, okay, everything’s, good, now, game bar is supposed to fix that kind of things by suspending background processes. But I don’t know that’s a that’s a story for another day: the bottom line: Sapphire pulse 7900 XD. What are we looking at Superior cooling versus the reference version of the car? Definitely a check mark the sapphire pulse. Usually that’s the card that you want to buy. If you want maximum value in Sapphire’s lineup like the pulse, that’s what Sapphire is going for.
It’S like – and this is a great example of 700 XT performance and what AMD can promise in terms of driver maturity and how well everything worked for me and testing and so on and so forth, so good job. I want to talk more about pricing in the pricing landscape, but MSRP and prices actually in the market are still two different things. Even given the not super amazing macro economic conditions, so use your brain and look at what’s available in your area and make the call based on you know: okay, this version of the 7900 XT versus all of the other versions versus the performance you can expect, which Kind of splits, the difference between reference 7900 XT and the reference 700 XTX, which is genuinely very impressive.
I don’t want to lose that messaging that that much of a difference can be had by board partners with just you know some tuning and optimization, maybe some binnings going on whatever Special Sauce Sapphire is doing here. It consistently outperforms the reference 7900 XT that I have so good job Sapphire, I’m one of this level. One thanks for hanging out. You can find me in the level one forums. Let me know, let me know what you want to see. Let me know what you want to see tested with these gpus or if you have some really obscure game that is GPU dependent, and you want me to try something at a different resolution or whatever.
Let me know I’m signing out here. Thank you. .