T
herearethankfullynowseveralwaystoavoid
AMD’snoisyblowercooleronthefirm’snew7nm
NaviGPUs.Youcouldaddyourownwaterblockto
a referencecard(seep102)or,if youwantaneasierlife,you
couldbuya cardwitha third-partycooler.Sapphire’sRadeon
RX 5700 XTPulseis onesuchcard,pairingAMD’stop-end
Navichipwitha customcooler.
It featurestwo95mmdual-ball-
bearingfansontopofa heatpipe-
equippedstackofheatsinkfins,with
a chunkyaluminiumbackplateon
theback.Sapphireclaimsthatit’s
improvedthedesignofitsfanblades
tomakethemupto 10 percent
quieterthanthecompany’sprevious
fans.Thefansarealsodigitally
controlledbya PWMchip,whichthe
companyclaimsmakestherotational
speedconsistentandaccurate.
Theonedownsideoftheheatsink
designisthattheopenfrontof
thecardmeansthefanspush
hotairbackintoyourcase,rather
thanouttheback.Thisistheusual
situationwiththird-partygraphics
cards,butthePulsedoesputout
a lotofheat– youcanreallyfeel
thewarmaircomingoutthefront
if youputyourhandinfrontofit.
You’llwanta goodfront-to-back
airflowsystemforthiscard.SAPPHIRE RADEONRX
5700 XT PULSE / £399incVAT
SUPPLIER scan.co.ukGRAPHICS CARD
Other bonuses of Sapphire’s Pulse card include a dual
BIOS system, plus the glowing Sapphire logo and visible
heatpipes on the top look great. The card isn’t particularly
long at 254mm, but it’s wide, taking up 2.5 expansion slots –
you won’t want to put it in a vertical PCI-E riser slot.
In addition to the improved cooling setup, there are some
clock speed improvements over AMD’s reference design.
The base clock is up from 1605MHz to 1670MHz, and the all-
important game clock has been pushed up by 60MHz to
1815MHz. The max boost clock is only 20MHz higher than the
reference clock, however. Meanwhile, the memory is set to
run at the same 875MHz (14GHz effective) clock rate.Performance
Those extra clock speeds give the Sapphire a healthy
performance boost over the reference design, adding 2-3fps
to the Total War: Warhammer II and Shadow of the Tomb
Raider frame rates. Battlefield V has had a big update since
we tested the reference cards, which negatively affects GPU
performance slightly, but the 5700 XT remains very fast in
this game in DirectX 11 mode, even outperforming the
GeForce RTX 2070 Super. The downside of the Radeon RX
5700 XT in this game, of course, is that you can’t enable the
real-time ray-tracing features – you’ll need an Nvidia RTX
card for that.
The noise from the cooler is also a big improvement over
AMD’s reference blower design. It’s not silent – you can
clearly hear the fans spinning up when you run a game, but
the noise is a low-frequency rumble, rather than a high-
pitched hiss. There’s also some room for overclocking
further. The Sapphire Pulse card let us improve the memoryREVIEWS / GRAPHICS CARD
S P E C
Graphics processor
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, 1670MHz base
clock, 1815MHz game clock, 1925MHz max
boost clock
Pipeline
40 compute units, 2,560 stream
processors, 64 ROPS
Memory
8GB GDDR6, 14GHz effective
Memory interface
256-bit
Bandwidth
448GB/sec
Interface
16x PCI-E 4
Outputs/inputs
3 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2b
Cooler
Two fans, 2.5-slot
Power connections
1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin
Card width
254mm