Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse Review: Quiet a Performance

Last December, AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. At the time, we noted that the price gap was far too narrow to warrant getting the "lesser" card. Since then, online prices have dropped over $100, with the Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse we're looking at today being one of the prime options. The RX 7900 XT ranks as one of the best graphics cards, and Sapphire looks to improve on the reference card with a larger form factor and better cooling... or at least quieter cooling.

All of the core specs remain unchanged, so you get the same AMD RDNA 3 GPU architecture, with a healthy 20GB of GDDR6 20Gbps memory. That's 67% more VRAM than Nvidia's similarly priced RTX 4070 Ti. Performance, as you might expect, remains largely unchanged. That's true of most third-party graphics cards, since at most you typically get a 3–5 percent factory overclock. In the case of the RX 7900 XT Pulse, it's a 2.1% factory overclock, with a 5.1% increase in TBP (total board power).

Here's the quick overview of the specs table for the Sapphire card along with some competing GPUs.

We already noted the only differences in core specs between the Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse and the reference 7900 XT: GPU boost clock and TBP/TGP. Those are the paper specs, however, and there are other differences in terms of card design, aesthetics, and other aspects.

Right now, Sapphire is one of the three least expensive RX 7900 XT cards available, the others being the XFX RX 7900 XT that uses AMD's reference design — an MBA or "Made By AMD" card — and the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming OC. They all cost $779.99, though Sapphire and ASRock cards require an instant rebate at Newegg to get there.

Several other 7900 XT models are available for around $800, while the most expensive options right now can cost as much as an RX 7900 XTX (around $950). Unless you really love the aesthetic of one of those premium cards, we'd recommend stepping up to the faster AMD XTX GPU rather than paying $200 extra, but that's ultimately an individual choice.

Looking at the primary competition, the Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti only comes with 12GB of VRAM, but it also has a lower TGP and gives you the typical Nvidia extras: DLSS, Frame Generation, tensor cores, and improved ray tracing hardware. We'll get to the performance results shortly, but in our current test suite, it's the usual story: Similar overall native resolution performance, AMD leads in rasterization and Nvidia leads in ray tracing.

Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse

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Sapphire's Pulse cards represent the base model designs from the company, with no extras like RGB lighting. You do get a support bracket for the card, though this sort of bracket tends to be far less user-friendly than the "kickstands" provided with some other GPUs. On the other hand, the support bracket screws into the case, so it won't shift around if you happen to carry your PC into a different room.

The Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse is a relatively large card at 313x134x53 mm. It's a triple-slot card for all intents and purposes — even if it's technically only a "2.7-slot" design, you can't really fit anything in that third overlapped slot. It weighs 1417g as well, which isn't too bad given the dimensions. For comparison, the reference AMD 7900 XT card measures 276x113x51.5 mm and weighs 1490g.

AMD's card is quite a bit more compact, but that also tends to impact cooling performance and noise levels, which is arguably the biggest draw for Sapphire's Pulse model. We'll get into the details on temperatures and noise later in the the review.

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As you'd expect for a >300W graphics card, you get triple fans to go along with the large dimensions. Sapphire's latest designs use "angular velocity blade" fans, which are supposed to move more air and last longer than previous Sapphire designs. Sapphire notes that the inclusion of the outer rim helps to improve downward air pressure, by up to 44%, with 19% more airflow. The fans are also 95mm in diameter, compared to AMD's reference design that uses 78mm fans.

The radiator has six heatpipes to help carry heat away from the GPU core and VRAM, which again represents a typical design for graphics cards with a 300W or higher TBP rating. The only real improvement would be to opt for a full vapor chamber instead of heatpipes, and that's something the Made By AMD cards use.

Video connectivity consists of dual HDMI 2.1 ports and dual DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR13.5 ports. The HDMI ports have a peak bandwidth of 48 Gbps while the DP2.1 ports offer up 54 Gbps of bandwidth. Uncompressed resolution support for AMD's latest RDNA 3 GPUs tops out at 4K and 229 Hz on DP2.1, while DSC (Display Stream Compression) can provide "visually lossless" 4K at up to 480 Hz. Do note that we're nowhere near getting 480 Hz 4K displays, however, with the fastest options right now being 240 Hz models.