Sapphire's new Pulse lineup is meant to bring Sapphire Nitro technology to a more affordable market segment by leaving out the bells and whistles, like RGB colors or the included extra fans we saw in our RX 580 Nitro+ Limited Edition review. Out of the box, the card comes with a relatively modest overclock of 3%, which still helps. Overall, when averaged over all our games at 1080p resolution, the Sapphire Pulse shows a 9% performance improvement over the Radeon RX 470, which uses the same GPU at a transistor level. The only changes AMD made are in the production process, which enables higher clock frequencies. Compared to NVIDIA's GTX 1060 3 GB, the Sapphire card nearly matches it with around a difference of 1%, which means AMD has made up important ground. The GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB is still 13% faster, but more expensive.

In our testing at 1080p, the RX 570 does very well, despite having "only" 4 GB of memory. Not a single game test shows a performance loss against a 8 GB card like the R9 390. Such differences only materialize when you go beyond 1080p, towards 4K. Since the RX 570 just doesn't have the horse power for 1440p or 4K, I think 4 GB memory is not a con, but rather a plus because it reduces pricing significantly.

Sapphire's thermal solution works well and delivers good noise levels with only 31 dBA, which is on par with many GTX 1060 cards. The quietest GTX 1060 custom designs we tested are significantly quieter though. Also included is the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. It's nice to see that Sapphire still gives you a backplate, even on a more value-oriented model; I like.

With this generation, AMD is addressing Blu-ray and multi-monitor power consumption, which is improved slightly. Unfortunately, gaming power draw is massively increased. To me, it looks as though AMD's GPU fabrication process improvements only help with achieving higher clocks, with no reduction in power consumption. Looking at performance-per-watt numbers, the RX 570 has dropped close to R9 Fury X levels, which makes NVIDIA's GPU nearly twice as energy efficient.

The Sapphire RX 570 Pulse 4 GB is currently listed online for $180, which is a refreshingly moderate price increase of just $10 over the AMD baseline price. In my opinion, these 10 bucks are very well spent for the better cooler, and the increase in performance also helps justify the cost. Still, the RX 570 will have a tough time facing the NVIDIA GTX 1060 3 GB, which is still a little bit faster, comes at similar pricing, but with much better power efficiency, which is often reflected in its extremely low noise output. The Sapphire RX 570 Pulse gets close, but can't beat it.