Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition Review

Name: Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition
Brand: Sapphire

W1zzard

on Nov 25th, 2019,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Sapphire

(59 Comments) »

Introduction

Just a few days ago, Sapphire released the Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition, a premium variant that crowns the company's RX 5700-series "Navi" family of graphics cards. Positioned above the RX 5700 XT Nitro+, the Special Edition adds better aesthetics and higher factory-overclocked speeds out of the box, including overclocked memory. This makes the Nitro+ Special Edition the fastest air-cooled Radeon RX 5700 XT on the market. Besides the higher clock frequencies, Sapphire is including their $30 ARGB fan kit pre-installed with the card, which makes for an impressive RGB light show. Sapphire is pricing the card at $480, which is a $30 increase over the RX 5700 XT Nitro+.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT is AMD's first true performance-segment graphics card in over two years since the RX Vega series. It's based on the brand new "Navi" architecture that leverages the 7 nm silicon fabrication process and has brand new number-crunching machinery AMD calls RDNA compute units. These constitute the biggest update to AMD's GPU design since the very first Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture circa 2013. Together with clock speeds, RDNA is designed to bring about massive IPC improvements over GCN. The silicon also has a number of architectural changes. An interesting series of price adjustments and product launches ensure that even at its starting price of $399, it offers a bit more price-performance than NVIDIA.

AMD had originally planned to launch the Radeon RX 5700 XT at $449 and the RX 5700 at $399, with the two cards beating the $499 NVIDIA RTX 2070 and $349 RTX 2060 respectively. This forced NVIDIA to refresh its lineup with the new RTX 2070 Super at $499 and the RTX 2060 Super at $399. The RTX 2060 Super in particular was carefully crafted not to cannibalize the RTX 2070. AMD seeped into this imbroglio of NVIDIA and slotted the RX 5700 XT at $399 and the RX 5700 at $349, at which prices they outclass the RTX 2060 Super and original RTX 2060 respectively. NVIDIA didn't adjust prices of its RTX 2060 Super or RTX 2070 Super any further, and we hence have a fair bit of headroom between the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super in which AMD's board partners can launch custom-design RX 5700 XT cards with factory-overclocked speeds and other goodies, such as quieter coolers.

At the heart of the Radeon RX 5700 XT is the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon with an impressive 10.3 billion transistors crammed into a 251 mm² die. Unlike the "Vega 20", Navi is a more traditional GPU in that the package only has the GPU die and is surrounded by memory chips. AMD opted for cost-effective 256-bit GDDR6 memory over exotic design choices such as HBM2. At a memory frequency of 14 Gbps, Navi enjoys a healthy memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. It also features the latest-generation PCI-Express gen 4.0 x16 host interface with full backwards compatibility for older generations of PCIe, so you can pair it with AMD's new Ryzen 3000 processors on an X570 chipset motherboard. The buzz-words "7 nm" and "PCIe gen 4.0" are extensively used in AMD's marketing, as if to suggest that Navi is a generation ahead of NVIDIA's Turing, which is built on 12 nm and has PCIe gen 3.0.

As mentioned earlier, the Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition ships with the company's highest factory-overclocked speeds for this SKU, with 2035 MHz maximum boost clock speeds for the GPU (up from 2010 MHz on the vanilla Nitro+), and memory overclocked to 14.4 Gbps (GDDR6-effective), up from 14 Gbps standard. Sapphire also uplifted the card's aesthetics by giving it RGB LED-illuminated fans in place of opaque ones on the original Nitro+. In this review, we take the Nitro+ Special Edition for a spin through our test suite.

Radeon RX 5700 XT Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
GTX 1070 Ti	$450	2432	64	1607 MHz	1683 MHz	2000 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RTX 2060	$340	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$330	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
GTX 1080	$500	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$400	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$490	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$700	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$400	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition	$480	2560	64	1840 MHz	2035 MHz	1800 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$470	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$500	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$700	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$650	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$700	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1100	4352	64	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Documentation

The Card

Visually, the Nitro+ Special Edition looks identical to the regular edition RX 5700 XT Nitro+; Sapphire came up with a completely fresh look for this generation's Nitro Series. The front of the cooler is dominated by black with some silver highlights. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate in a matching color theme.

Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 13.5 cm.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

As mentioned before, Sapphire is including three adjustable RGB fans on their card, which looks amazing.

Display connectivity options include two standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.0b ports.

With Navi, AMD updated the display controllers handling these outputs by leveraging DSC 1.2a (display stream compression), which unlocks very high resolution and refresh-rate combinations over a single cable. Among the single-cable display modes supported are 8K 60 Hz (which took two DP 1.3 cables until now), 4K 240 Hz, and 1080p as high as 360 Hz. On top of these, the outputs support HDR and 30 bpc color-depth for better color accuracy in creative applications.

The board uses two 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.

If you are the RGB type, this header will come in handy. It lets you synchronize the graphics card with your motherboard's RGB lighting. Simply connect a cable and select "external RGB" mode in TRIXX.

AMD's Navi generation of GPUs no longer supports CrossFire. DirectX 12 does include its own set of multi-GPU capabilities, but implementation requires game developers to put serious development time into a feature only a tiny fraction of their customers might ever use.

Sapphire made good use of that area by positioning their BIOS switch feature here. The second BIOS runs at reduced fan speed for a quieter experience. Please note that the BIOS switch supports three positions. From left to right, these are "default", "quiet", and "performance". With the default setting active, you are able to change the BIOS selection using Sapphire's TRIXX software. While the switch itself is instant, a reboot is required for the new BIOS to activate as the BIOS/driver only reads the BIOS during startup.

Disassembly

Sapphire is using five heatpipes and a copper base on their cooler. This piece of the cooler also provides cooling for the VRM circuitry. This cooler is 100% identical to the regular edition cooler.

Once the main heatsink is removed, a second heatsink that takes care of cooling the memory chips and some parts of the VRM circuitry becomes visible.

The RGB-illuminated backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.