Final Thoughts
As I mentioned we finally have custom Radeon RX 5700 series cards! While NVIDIA has excelled at their reference (Founders Edition) cards, AMD has sort of fallen short there. So if you were looking at either a 5700 or 5700 XT you were more than likely waiting for custom models. What Sapphire has in their Pulse is a custom card with a solid design, custom cooling solution, factory overclock, and other features you won’t find on reference models. You are going to get all of this for only $10 more than what the reference card costs! That is really a great value!
Sapphire’s Dual-X cooling solution is quite good and is very quiet given the size of the fans. What is even better is that the fans will turn off when there is not a load on the GPU. This not only keeps your system quiet, but also cuts down on power consumption. Sapphire has outfitted this card with a factory overclock of 1540 MHz for the base clock, 1700 MHz for the game clock, and 1750 MHz for the boost clock. That is going to give you a few more frames and games compared to the reference card. The card also features a slick backplate, dual-BIOS, and custom-design 12-layer PCB.
This would be a very solid 1440p gaming card with the settings maxed out in most games. In our testing we were able to get over 60 FPS in almost all of our tests. Also when the new TriXX software comes out with TriXX Boost you’ll be able to get a few more frames that way as well.
The card that this really competes with is the more expensive RTX 2060 Super. We were able to test it against the Gigabyte RTX 2060 Super Gaming OC 8G ($419.99) and it traded blows in many of the tests. Remember this card is only $359, so it is about $60 cheaper than many of the custom RTX 2060 cards. Performance aside the only thing the NVIDIA cards have that the 5700 lacks is ray tracing. So if that is something you are interested in NVIDIA would be the way to go. But at $60 cheaper and very similar performance the RX 5700 is a solid choice, and think how far $60 can go towards other parts.
At the end of the day Sapphire has a great card in their Pulse RX 5700 and it comes in at only $359, which is $10 more than the reference card. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 Graphics Card a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Only $10 more than the reference model
– Custom cooling solution
– Factory overclock
– Full-cover backplate
– Good overall performance
Cons:
– Lacks real time ray tracing
