Page 40 - PCWorld (September 2019)
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REVIEWS SAPPHIRE PULSE RADEON RX 5700
The card includes niceties new to the “Game clock” is new AMD terminology
Radeon RX 5700 series, including 8GB of for the expected clock speeds you’ll see in
blazing-fast GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit gaming workloads, and equivalent to Nvidia’s
bus, and cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 functionality if Boost clock ratings. AMD’s Boost clock
you’re running one of AMD’s excellent Ryzen speeds are the maximum peak speed
3000 processors (go.pcworld.com/x300) in achievable in brief bursts, typically in non-
an X570 motherboard. PCIe 4.0 speeds are gaming scenarios. We confirmed Sapphire’s
better suited to creative workloads, though. card indeed hovered between 1,690MHz
For gamers, Sapphire bolstered the Pulse and 1,700MHz in gaming benchmarks.
cards with mild overclocks. (The company’s The real value lays in the card design.
no doubt saving beefier tunings for more While the first wave of Radeon RX 5700
capable Nitro-branded versions of the RX offerings all stuck to the reference model’s
5700 in the future.) The Pulse RX 5700 offers ho-hum (but vastly improved) blower-style
Base and Game Clock speeds of 1,540MHz cooling, which uses a single fan to expel hot
and 1,700MHz, respectively, compared to air out of the back of your system, the
the slower 1,465MHz and 1,625MHz Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 deploys a more
reference speeds. common dual-axial fan design. Dual-axial
designs run cooler and quieter than
blower-style options, but dump the hot
air back into your system, relying on your
case fans to circulate the heat out.
Sapphire equipped the Pulse
Radeon RX 5700 with larger-than-usual
95mm fans atop a full-length heat sink.
Larger fans can run quieter than
standard-sized ones, but they push the
width of the card about an inch past the
norm. Be mindful of that if you’re hoping
to cram the Pulse into a space-
constrained mini-ITX case. It shouldn’t
be an issue in typical tower cases.
The Sapphire Pulse makes much less
noise than RX 5700 reference cards. You
A blowout render of the Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 cooler. can reduce the volume even further,
40 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2019
