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Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: Cheap model from Sapphire, good features and price

Sapphire's Pulse line of ''graphics cards'' are popular because they are typically among the cheapest on the market, yet offer solid performance comparable to competing midrange cards. And that applies to the Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX as well.

We already saw the Radeon RX 7900 XT reference a few weeks ago. Today we have the first test of one of the non-referential models. To start with, I'll just remind you that AMD introduced the new RDNA3 architecture last November.

The first models of the new generation are Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. Both are equipped with the highest graphics chip with RDNA3 architecture, codenamed Navi31. It is the first graphics chip split into a large computing core (GCD) and smaller chiplets (MCD), to which the infinite cache and memory controllers have been moved.

The more powerful RX 7900 XTX comes equipped with a fully active core chip, 24GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 20Gb/s connected via the 384b bus. AMD's recommended retail price is $999, which translates to around 27,400 kronor including tax.

In the RX 7900 XT, the chip has slightly worse parameters, it has only five functional MCD chiplets forming 80 MB of infinite cache and a 320b bus, on which 20 GB of GDDR6 memory are connected with a speed of 20 Gb/s. The recommended price is 24,600 kronor with VAT at the current exchange rate.

With the two new models, AMD is targeting the competitive 16GB GeForce RTX 4080. It starts at a suggested retail price of $1,200, which is 33,500 kronor including VAT at the current exchange rate. From below, the weaker RX 7900 XT is pushed by the generally cheaper GeForce GTX 4070 Ti. It has a noticeably lower price, but also generally lower performance and worse equipment. Mainly in terms of memory, with 12 GB GDDR6X, it is worse than RX 7900 XT, but to some extent it compensates, in addition to lower price, with lower consumption, better operating characteristics, wider support for DLSS 2.x titles in comparison with the competitor FSR 2.x and the new DLSS 3.

AMD considers the small dimensions of the reference cards compared to the GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition, the support of the new DisplayPort 2.1 standard among the outputs as main competitive advantages. Thanks to this, you will also be able to connect monitors with high resolutions and refresh rates higher than those allowed by HDMI 2.1, which will hit the market next year. It also has an additional power supply using eight classic pins. And the benefit is even greater memory capacity. Currently, 20 or 24 GB won't do you much good in games, but if you don't change the card as often again, the situation may be different four years from now. I won't scare you by saying that 16GB of memory on the RTX 4080 won't be enough, but it's possible that there are some games that can use more than the 16GB of memory.

Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX...Pulse is the entry-level model series from backyard manufacturer AMD Sapphire. Compared to most non-reference models, Pulso RX 7900 XTX is more compact, in the image below you have a comparison with the less powerful model TUF Radeon RX 7900 XT.

But I was surprised by the power supply. The Pulse is generally the cheapest of the cheapest cards in the basic design, but even in this design it has exactly three octaves. It's strange, considering how much emphasis AMD has placed on powering with two eight pins. Not against that, when it comes to a powerful card, three-eighths is always better than two, but it makes you think that it is one thing for marketing to present an “economic and efficient solution” and another reality. You can find three octaves on most models without a reference.

As usual with Pulse series cards, the packaging is tuned in shades of red on a white background, the motifs are simple, it plays nothing like the card itself.

Inside, in addition to the necessary leaflets, you will also find a support in resistant aluminum or duralumin and longer screws for fixing to the blinds.

No dual BIOS this time around, it's just as good on most boards, but just in case something goes wrong during the flash. The card has slightly higher clocks compared to the benchmarks. In the specs, Sapphire mentions increased gaming clocks from the benchmark 2300 to 2330 MHz and the clock boosted from "up to 2500" to 2525 MHz, GPU-Z still shows 2370 MHz.

This time, however, it cannot be said that the duty cycles are greater in practice, on the contrary, they decrease during intense workloads. The wattage cap apparently increased slightly from the reference 355 to around 363 W.

Not many sensors can be read in GPU-Z, but in HWinfo you can discover so much monitoring information that it will make your head spin.

Adam Vágner