AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 XT is a good mid-range card that delivers a strong 2560 x1440 gaming experience and high fps gaming at 1080p. While it isn’t quite a 4K UHD card, some titles are playable with all the eye-candy enabled while others will need some adjustment.
Sapphire took the card to a different level by upgrading the PCB and power delivery along with using a more effective and quiet cooler than the reference models with the Tri-X cooling solution. The large and mismatched sized fans offer good air flow and do so without being the loudest item in your system. The Tri-X cooling solution managed to stay fairly quiet throughout our testing. Though audible, there wasn’t any appreciable whine or hum coming from the fans outside of the wind noise that it generated.
Sapphire increased the clocks from reference speeds of 1605/1755/1905 (Base/Game/Boost, respectively) to 1670/1815/2010 on the Nitro+. This is a lot faster than the Gigabyte RX 5700 XT Gaming OC, though the latter is less expensive. The clocks are one of the fastest available (The ASRock Taichi OC+ holds that crown).
To that end, the price for the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 5700 XT is currently $469.99 at Newegg with the Gigabyte we compared it to priced at $419.99. For the $50 difference, users get a faster card by a few percent on average, and a better cooling solution. If you need to save a few dollars, the PowerColor Red Devil sports the same clock speeds and solid cooling. With that said, I would like to see the Nitro+ priced just a bit lower. It was released at $440 but the price has gone up a little since that time. Surely a sale from any of the major etailers will bring it back down.
Overall the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 5700 XT performed well against the lower, reference clocked card as to be expected. In GPU-heavy titles, the higher clock speeds showed several percent difference, while in less demanding titles, that gap shrinks. Sapphire’s Tri-X cooling solution kept the card cool under load and did so without sounding like an airplane with propellers taking off. Priced at $469, it is one of the more expensive Radeon RX 5700 XT cards out there, trumped only by the new ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi OC+.
Besides price, the only concern with the card is the size. Because it is longer than t over 12-inches it won’t fit some cases. . Outside of that, performance was good as well as the cooling solution. If you need a quiet RX 5700 XT with robust cooling, premium styling and some of the fastest overclocks out of the box, the Sapphire Nitro+ falls on the shortlist of cards we’d want.
For those looking for something much more affordable, the AMD has also announced a Navi-based RX 5500 that the company says will come in desktop form and compete with the GTX 1650 and 1660. And if you're looking for a card that can better handle 4K, recent mentions of Navi 22 and Navi 23 in a recent Linux driver (first spotted by 3DCenter forum veteran Berniyh) may (or may not) be our first glimpse of higher-end AMD GPUs that could compete with Nvidia's RTX 2080 Super and 2080 Ti.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content
