Introduction

Sapphire today launched Radeon RX 5700 XT Pulse, its first custom-design RX 5700 XT Navi graphics card. The Pulse series of graphics cards from Sapphire are positioned as high cost-performance products, just below its premium Nitro series. Priced close to the $400 baseline AMD asks for this GPU, the RX 5700 XT Pulse combines a custom-design PCB with similar VRM chops to the AMD reference design, but tops it with a dual BIOS and the much sought after idle=fan-stop feature. This launch by Sapphire comes a little over a month since AMD's 7th July debut of the RX 5700 Navi series.

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 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 CoreNext (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 ensures 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 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, which means 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.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Pulse features a custom-design PCB that has similar specs to the AMD reference PCB with its 7+2 phase setup, but a significantly different design with a different combination of a VRM controller and components. The dual-BIOS feature protects you from bad BIOS flashing. There's also a reasonable factory overclock with 1925 MHz maximum boost frequency to be had. The cooling solution features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by a pair of fans that turn off when the GPU is idling. At a price of $410, the card is only $10 pricier than the AMD reference design.