Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sapphire Nitro + 7800 XT Quick Review”.
This is the most exciting GPU launch in an age, and I’ve got the sapphire Nitro plus RX 7800 XT to take a quick look at Sapphire. Yes, so the 7800, if you are not familiar, I did a separate review of the AMD reference version and the launch and all the stuff around the launch. This is rdna3. It has 16 gigabytes of vram. This is meant to be five year card. The card that is accessible for a long long time like you, buy it and you use it for two three four five years or you know the car, that’s at the affordable price point, the most performance per dollar price point: that’s what this is meant to be, And mostly, it delivers and we’ll take a look at that in terms of the benchmarks in terms of the build and the fit and finish this feels like a top tier card. Like you know, the 1700 is sort of the middle of the road card.
It’S not the least expensive, and it is by far not the most expensive. In fact, you can spend three times as much on a GPU that wouldn’t deliver three times the performance, but it’s a large card. It is fully every bit of three slots. It also has a three slot bracket at the end, which you should be careful of, because a lot of the time builds in different cases will make physical accommodations for two brackets.
Even though there is room for three brackets worth of stuff, especially if you’re using this uh, you know in a bottom slot you’re doing a threadripper, build uh, something like that and so you’re hanging off the end of the motherboard things in, like the fractal defined XL Case where you’ve got the extra slot at the bottom, that kind of thing wouldn’t work for a true three slot bracket, but it does give Sapphire the ability to build in Full full length, GPU bracket support. They also made their GPU taller. So if you’re in a case like the lien Li 011 Dynamic, it can make, builds, in that case a little more Troublesome. But they have recessed the power connector, which is the thing that you usually run into the problem.
And so because the power connector is recessed. Even though the card is super tall, it sort of gives you the best of both worlds. It gives you the best shot at this GPU. Actually, working in some of those cases where the the motherboard tray depth is is not as much but you know it is a full three slot bracket at the end, something to consider when you’re doing your build.
It is a full. You know metal back plate and metal support. We’Ve also got a GPU anti-sag support bracket built on this side as well. So mechanically. This is a significant chunker of a card. I like that.
It actually feels like the toxic Sapphire, toxic, they’re sort of their their most famous highest and Ultra Premium card, and this sort of feels like a toxic card from a couple of generations ago or three three, four more than a couple of generations ago. It’S a very, very beefy card. We have three large and very quiet fans. We’Ve got a little bit of pass-through cooling on the end of the card here, but mostly the card is shorter and thicker for a 7 800 class GPU again, this is the middle of the road GPU they’re, not dumping 600 watts of power into this. This is kind of Overkill, I mean look, we’ve got five heat pipes coming out the end of the heatsink on the end here. This is just it’s just Madness, but as we’ll see in the benchmarks, the madness is perhaps Justified.
We’Ve also got two eight pin power. Connectors the my favorite thing about this GPU is that you can have a normal power supply on your computer. 700.
Watts, 750 watts 800 watts. All of that is fine and will work great with this GPU pretty much, no matter what your build is, except for maybe the highest end. You know threadripper or you’re doing something off label for just a normal desktop build.
I’Ve only got a 700 watt power supply of two eight pin connectors. This is the card that can do 60fps at 4K. Even before we get into the whole frame generation upscaling technology stuff, it is a really nice attractive, build I’ll, also mention that it does have a bios switch, which is awesome if you’re, a Linux user and you’re flashing bioses are trying different stuff. You’Ve always got a recovery path as long as you only use one of your bios for experimentation and the other bios for Recovery.
Very nice we’ve also got a an RGB out header and a fan in header. The display connectors on this GPU are a little unusual. You have two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 2.1, so dual DisplayPort dual HDMI. If wishes were horses, I would have preferred just adding an HDMI, so you had five connectors, any four of which were usable but hey.
It’S a 7800 class GPU and they’re trying to make the GPU not cost significantly more than the AMD reference version as compared with the AMD reference version. This is a physically much larger card. In fact, the reference version of the AMD 7800 is the smallest to 7. 800, that I’ve seen it would fit in a lot of very very small, builds, whereas this is basically your your high tier GPU from last generation, three slots truly three slots needs Cooling and basically always accept power, so something to consider when you’re working on your build. This GPU is also an excellent choice for Linux workstations, because the extreme Maximum Overkill and cooling means that this GPU is going to run cool all of the time, even when you’re playing games, the temperatures are really pretty impressive. So, let’s take a look at the performance, so for Borderlands 3. The name of the game here is to look for improvements over reference and starting it off at 4K. We’Re seeing a pattern a little bit of a pattern that emerges at 4K but is maybe not elsewhere, so Borderlands 3, it’s an older title and already the 7800 XT Nitro plus Edition is pulling a little bit ahead and both are one percent lows and our overall Average frame rate nice job, but we dropped down to 1080P and while we get a higher average frame rate, something weird was going on and our one percent lows were significantly lower.
Now the 7800 XT reference and the Nitro plus were tested at different times, and this is after I was troubleshooting an F1 2023 issue. So I think this was because the state of the system was different during the reference card testing and the Borderlands 3 testing. But uh I didn’t have a lot of time with this card, so uh things have to go on. We saw that at 1440p, so I feel like this is a system specific issue and I didn’t see this in any other games. So I think this is probably just something down to the system and not anything with the hardware itself for the Callisto protocol at 4K, 115 FPS, the one percent of 0.1 percent lows – I mean that’s just Callisto protocol. This is the 4K High preset over 100 FPS.
On a you know, five six hundred dollar class GPU at launch very impressive 221 FPS at 1080p, with one percent lows. Staying around 60. 1440p again one percent low sticking pretty close to 60 180 FPS 1440p is probably where I would play Callisto protocol or 4K like a medium high, as opposed to the high preset cyberpunk 2077 at 4K, 84 FPS, very, very respectable and a very respectable Performance bump over the reference editions, just barely outside of margin of error, but the increased clock, speed of the sapphire Nitro plus is is appreciable. Here you can get even a little more than this if you’re willing to overclock, but these are the out-of-the-box numbers in terms of performance, 193 versus 195, basically, margin of error for 1080 and 1440 143 versus 146. for fire strike. It does make a pretty significant difference.
I mean 49 000 overall score versus 47 000 for the reference Edition. You can tell that Sapphire has done something different with this card over reference shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K, basically within margin of error in terms of differences 251 versus 245, okay at 1080p. I am seeing a little bit of an uplift outside of margin of error: 178 versus a 183, a 1440p yeah, that’s probably down to um, that’s probably down to improvements in the card as well, but it’s kind of close 18 000 versus 19726 sapphires made some improvements To their card, this is a pretty strong showing overall and there we are there’s the reason that you buy this card temperature and Noise. We’Ve got a 15 degree C Improvement average over the reference version of this card. The sapphire doesn’t believe in running the card hot, because that’s just how Sapphire rolls now there’s not a huge difference between our hot spot temperatures among the 7 800 models that I’m testing, but even that shows a pretty significant improvement over the reference model, but still how. I test this is, I run Callisto protocol for a very, very long time on a benchmark Loop. Basically, because Callisto protocol is basically on The Struggle Bus when it comes to uh the high presets, as evidenced by the one percent lows and everything else, is it or we GPU limited or CPU limited it’s kind of a real world gaming test, as opposed to an Artificial Benchmark for your GPU, which is just gon na, run your GPU at some ridiculous temperature all the time. This card was also surprisingly quiet under this test. If you’re playing a game with your desktop on your desktop, it’s going to be much less noticeable in terms of fan noise and everything else over the hum of the rest of your system. Giant heat pipes, notwithstanding probably something to do with sapphire design.
Sapphire also has one unique software trick up their sleeve called Trix boost. A Trix boost is a neat technology. I wouldn’t exactly call it resolution scaling, but it lets you render the game part of the game, not the HUD part of the game at a lower resolution and get a performance benefit, but it’s not hard and fast, like you, don’t render 1440p and upscale it to 4K, you can render it some in between resolution between 1440 and 4K. Some games have added this kind of thing natively, but Trix boost lets. You do this, basically with any game, sometimes with side effects. Sometimes not, but generally Sapphire is doing a pretty good job here.
Making that work for their gpus overall, the verdict here this is a superior cooling solution. This is probably a five-year solution in terms of GPU engineering and a little bit of an overclock out of the box definitely helps at higher resolutions lower resolutions, not so much because you’re probably limited by other things that are going on with the system, but higher resolutions. Yeah for sure, definitely in general now and in the past, I’ve liked Sapphire Hardware engineering. This card is no exception.
I think they’ve, probably over built it for what the 7800 is. I mean I get why they made the choices they made and overall so far in my testing, it’s a pretty solid card, I’m going to try to squeeze in some Linux testing with this card before I have to send it back, because I do think the 7800 Series is going to be the the every man Enthusiast like. I don’t want to spend too much money on my GPU, but I kind of want a nice GPU GPU for Linux and Sapphire generally on Linux. It’S been a pretty solid option, but you’ll have to wait for another video for that, I’m one of those level one I’m signing out.
You can find me in the level one forums .