Final Thoughts
The Radeon RX 7600 XT from AMD is an interesting one. The non-XT version came out all the way back in May of 2023, so its been quite a while and most of us actually were not expecting an XT version as the RX 7600 completely maxed out the Navi 33 silicon. It would be quite costly for AMD to make use of a cut-down version of the Navi 32, so when I heard rumors of a RX 7600 XT I wondered what it would be based off of.
With the Radeon RX 7600 XT we have the same configuration of a maxed out Navi 33 chip, but AMD has upped the clocks, with the game clock being 2470 MHz (up from 2250 MHz) and boost clock at 2775 MHz (up from 2660 MHz). On top of that you are getting double the VRAM. We’ve heard the screams of people on Reddit and other forums that 8GB is just not enough VRAM for gaming, so moving up to 16GB VRAM makes sense. Also you have to think about the competition with the 7600 (non-XT) NVIDIA was able to beat it in performance with their RTX 4060 and that card is only slightly more expensive. Like the 7600 (non-XT), the RTX 4060 only has 8GB of VRAM. So coming out with the 7600 XT, AMD has a card that slots in between the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti.
And in pretty much all of our tests this is what we saw. While AMD designed the 7600 (non-XT) to be purely a 1080P card, you are going to get some more performance out of the 7600 XT. Unfortunately we do not have a 7600 (non-XT) on hand to test, but from what we’ve seen the XT will give you 7-10% better performance. In our 7-game test suite we saw an average of 105.39 FPS at 1080P and an average of 70.72 at 1440P. So you are going to easily be able to play games at 1080P, but you’ll have a little more headroom to push the resolution up to 1440P or get better performance for more demanding titles.
AMD has definitely made improvements in their ray tracing technology as well as their up-scaling frame generation. It still is not on-par with what NVIDIA is offering. One of the main reasons is that NVIDIA off-loads all of this to dedicated cores, while AMD uses their shader cores for this. At this performance level I’m not sure ray tracing performance is something gamers are really looking at. Upscaling on the other hand is, and with the 7600 XT we do have AMD’s FSR3. There is not many titles that support this currently, but there are many more titles that support FSR2 and we’ve shown you what that can do in this review.
For Sapphire’s part with their Pulse card we have a slightly overclocked card with a custom cooling solution. That cooling solution was able to keep this card extremely cool during our testing, although with the fans spin up they were noticeably louder than our other cards, even cards with 3 fans. It was nice to see a full-cover metal backplate as well.
AMD has set the MSRP for the Radeon RX 7600 XT at $330, this is compared to the $300 of the RTX 4060, $390 of the RTX 4060 Ti, and $270 of the RX 7600 (non-XT). The 22% increase in price is really hard to justify, even if you are getting double the VRAM. That extra VRAM is only going to come in handy in certain scenarios. I think that AMD needs to bring this card closer to the RTX 4060 for it to really compete, but it does offer a good alternative for the AMD fan who’s worried about the 8GB of VRAM on the non-XT version.
I think that if you pick up this card for 1080P gaming you are going to be pretty satisfied. Sapphire is keeping this card at the MSRP so you can pick it up at our favorite online retailer for $330. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 XT Pulse Graphics Card an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Increased clock speeds
– Double the VRAM compared to the non-XT version
– Runs cool
– Fits nicely between the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti
– Full-cover metal backplate
– No power adapters needed
Cons:
– Fans are a bit loud
– Should be priced a bit lower
