Packaging

The Card

The unique selling point of the Sapphire Pure is its white color theme. Functionally, the Pure is a Pulse with white cooler shroud, and increased clock speeds. Sapphire's color theme looks great, some black highlights break up the white surfaces—very nice. On the back, you'll find a metal backplate, which is designed to let some airflow through the cooler.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1123 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and two HDMI 2.1a (same as RDNA 2).

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with two independent hardware units that can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. There's support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


The card uses a classic dual 8-pin together with PCIe slot power input config, rated for 375 W maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12V-2x6 connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw.


This switch lets you turn off the card's red lighting—without any software.

Teardown

Sapphire's card lets you remove and replace the fan assembly without touching the thermal paste. This makes it easy to fix the fans after a few years when their bearings are worn out.


The thermal solution on the card has five heatpipes. The main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


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