Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure Review: Pretty but Expensive

The Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure doesn't differ much from any other RX 7700 XT card when it comes to performance, but it's the little things that matter. In this case, the most compelling reasons to pick up the Pure are that you like the way it looks (a subjective reason at best), or because you want a quieter graphics card. That's sufficient justification to fork over your lunch money if you're in the market for a 7700 XT, we'd say.

In our tests, the Sapphire card wasn't really audible above the noise created by the rest of our test PC. We don't have a noisy PC by any stretch, but the CPU cooler can definitely spin up the fans to keep the Core i9-13900K cool while gaming. And "cool" is relative, as Intel's latest CPU can often sit at more than 90C under modest loads. If you're building a PC and want to keep noise pollution down, besides selecting a better CPU cooler, grabbing the Sapphire card would be a good approach.

Of course it's not just about noise, and the same drawbacks with the RX 7700 XT still apply here. Specifically, the RX 7800 XT offers better bang for the buck. Except, that only applies if you're looking at less robust cooling solutions for the RX 7800 XT — like the dual-fan Sapphire RX 7800 XT Pulse. We haven't tested that model and thus can't speak directly to its cooling or noise performance, but one less fan will make a difference.

Most of the triple-fan 7800 XT cards meanwhile seem to cost closer to $550 rather than $500. Like the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Pure, which costs $569 — $100 more than the 7700 XT Pure. That's 21% more money, for about 18% more performance. But what we'd really like to see are 7700 XT cards selling for closer to $400 and 7800 XT cards at $500 or less.

If $469 is a hard limit, your choices boil down to the RX 7700 XT, a previous generation RX 6800, or potentially Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. We don't particularly care for the latter; if the 7700 XT feels overpriced, the 4060 Ti 16GB feels much more so. Alternatively, you could drop down to $280 for an RTX 4060, $320 for an RX 6700 XT, or $370 for an RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, all of which end up as better values than a $470 7700 XT.

But again, that assumes you're willing to just take whatever card you can find for the lowest price possible, noise levels be damned. You'll generally get the lowest noise levels from triple-fan cards, which means at a minimum you'd have to spend $310 for an RTX 4060, $330 for an RX 6700 XT, or $400 for an RTX 4060 T — and even though all of those are triple-fan cards, we still can't personally attest to their having low noise levels. Based on the style of fans (specifically, none of those have integrated rims), they're probably all going to be noisier cards.

Trying to find a high-quality graphics card that's as quiet as possible can be tricky, and the price of admission always tends to be $60–$100 higher than "typical" models using the same GPU. You know the ones we're talking about, with two rimless fans that inevitably make more noise. In that sense, the Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure actually looks quite reasonable: It's like a $400 RX 7700 XT, with a $70 add-on fee to get a quiet card.

Considering the least expensive RX 7700 XT cards cost $450, there's unfortunately no option to go much lower on pricing while sticking with the same GPU. RX 6800 might be your best bet to cut costs if you want an AMD card with this level of performance, though prices on that GPU keep bouncing between $400 and $430. The former is reasonable; the latter, not so much. Nvidia's alternatives have the usual pros and cons as well.

Ultimately, Sapphire's RX 7700 XT Pure is worth considering, particularly if you want a cool and quiet PC, and it looks nice as well. We feel it's worth the extra $20 compared to the base models, at least for users that put more value on noise levels. Because silence truly is golden, in more ways than one.

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