Packaging

The Card

The RX 9060 XT Pulse follows the color theme of earlier Pulse GPUs—black and red are the primary colors. You now get a metal "Sapphire" logo near the top edge and some additional detail has been added in that area, too. The metal backplate has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 24.5 x 12.5 cm, and it weighs 646 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 46 mm.


The card is a little bit too wide to be exactly two slots, note how the networking card does fit in the slot, but it will not sit straight. Not sure why Sapphire designed their card to be a bit too wide, consider it a 2.5 slot card in practice.


Display connectivity includes one standard DisplayPort 2.1b and two HDMI 2.1b.

AMD put in some extra work for creative professionals, particularly those into video editing, by giving Navi 44 its latest video engine. The video engine supports concurrent hardware-accelerated encode and decode for AV1, HEVC, and H.264 video codecs. With RDNA 4, AMD has improved the image quality of H.264 encoding at lower bitrates, which should make AMD appeal to content creators. The AV1 encoder and decoder support B-frames, a technology with which there can be a significant reduction in bitrates without a loss in image quality.


The card uses a single 8-pin connector, which allows a maximum power draw of 150 W, plus 75 W from the slot, but the actual board power limit is set much lower of course.


The Sapphire Pulse does not come equipped with any lighting features.

Teardown

The fan assembly can be removed easily, which makes it easy to replace a broken fan in a couple of years—no need to touch the thermal paste of the card.


Sapphire has installed three heatpipes on their thermal solution, the main heatsink also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note the thermal pads, which provide cooling for the memory chips on the back-side of the PCB.