Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC Review

Name: Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC
Brand: Sapphire
Price: 280 USD

W1zzard

on May 24th, 2023,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Sapphire

(39 Comments) »

Introduction

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC is the company's close-to-reference custom design rendition of the newly launched AMD Radeon RX 7600. The Pulse series of graphics cards by Sapphire represent the value end of the company's custom-design series, and is designed for those who just want an RX 7600 graphics card that they can install and forget about. Sapphire still puts in work to make its Pulse series some of the quietest custom-designs out there. The AMD Radeon RX 7600 represents an unexpected jump by AMD from the enthusiast-segment RX 7900 series, down to the mid-range, with no performance-segment RX 7700-series or RX 7800-series launches along the way. The RX 7600 comes with all of the latest technologies the company has introduced with its latest RDNA 3 generation.

The Radeon RX 7600 is based on AMD's latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, although the silicon itself is based on the slightly older 6 nm foundry node, not the latest 5 nm. AMD probably thinks it can pull off a mid-range GPU from this generation on the older node with minimal performance/Watt losses compared to the competition, which comes from NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 series. The RDNA 3 graphics architecture debuts a completely redesigned dual-compute unit (CU), with dual issue-rate SIMD machinery that supports new math formats; the company's second-generation Ray Accelerator that offers a 50% increase in ray intersection performance over RDNA 2, and the new AI Accelerators, which speed up matrix multiplication and other forms of math relevant to AI deep-learning neural net building and training (essentially AMD's version of a Tensor core).

The RX 7600 maxes out the "Navi 33" silicon it is based on, enabling all 32 RDNA 3 compute units physically present, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. Just like the shader counts, the memory sub-system is unchanged from the previous generation, albeit generationally improved. The RX 7600 enjoys 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. This runs at higher 18 Gbps speeds, and the company is using second-generation Infinity Cache, a 32 MB last-level cache on the GPU that speeds up the memory sub-system. The RX 7600 also gets AMD Radiance Display Engine, which offers support for the latest DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1 connector standards, while the RDNA 3 media engine offers dual simultaneous media encode streams.

The Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse OC features a simple aluminium fin-stack cooler with a fan profile that prioritizes low noise, and a PCB that's very close to the AMD reference design. The card is meant to be compact and highly compatible across most gaming PC case types. Power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Sapphire offers a tiny factory-overclock with this card, which sees the Game clock set at 2356 MHz, compared to 2250 MHz AMD reference. The memory is untouched at 18 Gbps. Sapphire has decided to price the RX 7600 Pulse OC at the AMD MSRP of $269.

Radeon RX 7600 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 5500 XT	$170	1408	32	1717 MHz	1845 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 14	6400M	4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 5600 XT	$190	2304	64	1375 MHz	1560 MHz	1500 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 6500 XT	$150	1024	32	2685 MHz	2825 MHz	2248 MHz	Navi 24	5400M	4 GB, GDDR6, 64-bit
RTX 2060	$180	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX Vega 64	$320	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
RX 5700 XT	$180	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3050	$260	2560	32	1552 MHz	1777 MHz	1750 MHz	GA106	12000M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 2070	$230	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Arc A750	$250	3584	112	2050 MHz	N/A	2000 MHz	ACM-G10	21700M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6600	$210	1792	64	2044 MHz	2491 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 23	11060M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 6600 XT	$250	2048	64	2359 MHz	2589 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 23	11060M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 3060	$300	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	12000M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 4060	$300	3072	32	1830 MHz	2460 MHz	2125 MHz	AD107	unknown	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 7600	$270	2048	64	2250 MHz	2625 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 33	13300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse OC	$270	2048	64	2356 MHz	2754 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 33	13300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Arc A770	$290	4096	128	2100 MHz	N/A	2187 MHz	ACM-G10	21700M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080	$260	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$320	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4060 Ti	$400	4352	48	2310 MHz	2535 MHz	2250 MHz	AD106	22900M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 6700 XT	$320	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$400	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$350	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$420	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$470	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit

Architecture

AMD Radeon RX 7600 is based on the Navi 33 silicon that the company chose to built on the older 6 nm (DUV) foundry node that significantly lower transistor density than the 5 nm EUV node that the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series is based on. The chip has a die-area of 204 mm², and transistor count of 13.3 billion (for reference, NVIDIA is able to cram 22.9 billion transistors into a 190 mm² silicon using 5 nm, with the AD106 powering the RTX 4060 Ti). The GPU has essentially the same component hierarchy as the previous-generation Navi 23. Its host interface is PCI-Express 4.0 x8, and power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, which is sufficient, given the gaming total board power for the RX 7600 of 169 W. The GPU features a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, and 8 GB is the standard memory size for the RX 7600.

AMD hasn't put out a block diagram of the Navi 33, but it features two Shader Engines (compared to six on the Navi 31). Each of these has 8 RDNA 3 Dual-Compute Units (16 CU), which share Raster machinery, and Render Backends. The GPU features Centralized Geometry Processors, asynchronous compute engines, and geometry processors shared among the two Shader Engines. Given its CU count of 32, we arrive at 2,048 stream processors, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The GPU uses a 2nd Gen 32 MB Infinity Cache memory that cushions data access to the memory.

Much of the architectural innovation is this generation is with the RDNA 3 Dual-Compute Unit (or Compute Unit pair). The "Navi 33" GPU physically features 32 compute units spread across two Shader Engines. AMD claims that at the same engine clocks, the RDNA 3 CU offers a 17.4% IPC increase over the RDNA 2 CU.

The new RDNA 3 CU introduces multi-precision capability for the 64 stream processors per CU: operating either as 1x SIMD64 or 2x SIMD32 units. The Vector Unit that houses these SIMD units can either function as a SIMD execution mechanism, or as a Matrix execution unit, thanks to the new AI Matrix Accelerator, which provides a 2.7x matrix multiplication performance uplift versus conventional SIMD execution. Also added are support for the Bfloat16 instruction-set, and SIMD8 execution. The GPU hence enjoys AI hardware-acceleration that can be leveraged in future feature-additions relevant to gamers, such as FSR 3.0. Game developers will also look for ways to exploit accelerated AI, now that all three brands feature it (NVIDIA Tensor cores and Intel XMX cores).

AMD's first-generation Ray Accelerator, introduced with the RDNA 2 architecture, was the result of a hasty effort to catch up to NVIDIA with a DirectX 12 Ultimate GPU, where they developed a fixed-function hardware to calculate ray intersections, and offloaded a large chunk of RT processing to the generationally-doubled SIMD resources. With RDNA 3, they've refined the Ray Accelerator to achieve an 80% ray tracing performance uplift over the previous generation, when you add up the Ray Accelerator count, their higher engine clocks, and other hardware-level optimizations, such as early sub-tree culling, specialized box sorting modes, and reduced traversal iterations.

There is a 50% ray intersection capacity improvement for RDNA 3 thanks to these optimizations, and cycles-per-ray reduction. Besides these, AMD has also made several improvements to the geometry- and pixel-pipes, with the introduction of the new multi-draw indirect accelerator (MDIA), which reduces CPU API and driver-level overheads by gathering and parsing of multi-draw command data. At the hardware-level 12 primitives per clock is now supported compared to 8 per clock on RDNA 2, thanks to culling. The core-configuration overall enables 50% more rasterized performance per clock.

AMD has significantly improved the Display Engine of "Navi 33" over the previous-generation in terms of connectivity. The new Radiance Display Engine comes with native support for DisplayPort 2.1, which enables 8K output at up to 165 Hz refresh-rate, or 4K at up to 480 Hz, with a single cable. AMD has refined its FSR 2 algorithm to support 8K (i.e. render at a lower resolution with FSR-enhanced upscaling), to make it possible to enjoy the latest AAA titles at playable frame-rates on 8K displays. The RX 7600 gets two full-size DP 2.1 connectors, besides an HDMI 2.1b, and a USB-C with DP 1.2 passthrough. The "Navi 33" silicon receives full hardware-accelerated AV1 encode and decode capabilities. With this generation, AMD is also introducing SmartAccess Video, a feature that lets the AMD driver leverage the hardware encoders of the RDNA 2 iGPU of Ryzen 7000 desktop processors, for additional encoding performance.

Packaging

The Card

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC debuts a new cooling solution design that retains the minimalist red-on-black color scheme of the series. There's no fancy RGB lighting to be had, whatever visual uplift is from the design itself. The cooler shroud is made of plastic, but the backplate is metal.

Dimensions of the card are 24.0 x 12.0 cm, and it weighs 627 g.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and one HDMI 2.1a.

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.

The card's sole power connector is an 8-pin PCIe. Together with 75 W PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 225 W.

Teardown

Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC exudes simplicity, so taking it apart is pretty straightforward. The cooler shroud comes off more easily than the rest of the heatsink, so you can clean its fans without having to take the whole cooler apart (and disturb the TIM or thermal pads).

The main heatsink uses a single aluminium fin-stack with its fins arranged longitudinally. A copper base-plate makes contact with the GPU and memory, there are additional contact points for the VRM.

The cooler uses two heatpipes that convey heat through the fin-stack in an S-shape.

The backplate is made of metal, and its three-dimensional design counteracts PCB sagging over time.

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, videos or forum posts.