Page 41 - PCWorld (September 2019)
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plastic shroud would be
welcome, but again: Sapphire’s
only charging $9 more for all
these extras, and the card looks
just fine in your case.
Connection-wise, the
Sapphire Pulse RX 5700
packs a single HDMI port and
a trio of DisplayPorts.
Soon, Sapphire will release
an updated version of its Trixx
overclocking and monitoring
There’s a cut-out in the backplate for the dual-BIOS switch. software that includes a new
feature dubbed Trixx Boost.
though, by activating the card’s secondary Boost creates custom display resolutions slightly
“Silent” profile via a physical dual-BIOS switch under the standard monitor resolution for a
on the outer edge of the card. Doing so noticeable performance boost, then uses
makes the card run much quieter but drops AMD’s new Radeon Image Sharpening to
the GPU speeds to 1,465MHz Base / minimize the visual impact. It’s great—but we’ll
1,625MHz Game clocks. The (very) slight dive into that in a separate section after the
drop in performance might be worth the standard performance benchmarks.
acoustic improvement to your ears, though.
The focus on thermals continues under the OUR TEST SYSTEM
hood. The Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 Our dedicated graphics card test system is
packs dedicated VRM and memory cooling packed with some of the fastest
to keep temperatures low, with a complementary components available, to put
conductivity pad over the VRMs transferring heat any potential performance bottlenecks
to the graphics card’s full-length metal squarely on the GPU. Most of the hardware
backplate—a nice extra to find on a card that was provided by the manufacturers, but we
costs just $9 more than reference designs. The purchased the cooler and storage ourselves.
12-layer PCB includes 7+1+2 phase digital • Intel Core i7-8700K processor ($350 on
power and fuse protection against power surges, Amazon at go.pcworld.com/700k)
while the plastic shroud includes the Sapphire • EVGA CLC 240 closed-loop liquid cooler
name in glowing red letters. A metal or firmer ($120 on Amazon at go.pcworld.com/c240)
SEPTEMBER 2019 PCWorld 41
