Sapphire Pure Radeon RX 7700 XT, 12GB GDDR6, 2x HDMI, 2x DP, lite retail

Vorgestern ging pünktlich zum Marktstart der beiden Karten auch unser Test einiger Modelle der Radeon RX 7800 XT und Radeon RX 7700 XT online.

It's been quite a long road for both NVIDIA and their GeForce RTX 5xxx series and AMD and their Radeon RX 9xxx series but we're finally days away before the first reviews make it online (if all goes well, from what I hear some issues have risen so it could be a bumpy launch for the latter) and so what better way to prepare for that than to test not one but two of the latest AMD cards launched by Sapphire? Well as the review title states today with me, I have both the Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and the Pure AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT models by Sapphire which I've been testing for almost 2 full months now.

Just last week, we've posted nine reviews of AMD's new Radeon RX 7700 XT/7800 XT lineup. Today we have our tenth review, the Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pure. While the RX 7700 XT Pulse is designed to be a "good enough" card that targets the AMD $450 MSRP, the Pure is a little bit more premium, with a white color theme, factory overclock, triple fan cooler and red illumination. Under the hood, both cards are based on the same Navi 32 graphics processor, which, just like Navi 31 uses the chiplet design approach that made Ryzen processors so successful. Instead of a single large monolithic die, the processor is made up from several smaller pieces, which are easier to build, with a much lower defect rate. The chiplet strategy on Navi 32 is identical to Navi 31. A central GCD die, which contains all the shaders engines, is surrounded by several MCD dies, which provide the memory interface and L3 cache. On the RX 7800 XT there's four MCDs, to build a 256-bit memory interface, whereas RX 7700 XT uses only three MCDs, resulting in a 192-bit interface. The fourth die is not "missing," but AMD has placed a non-functional dummy die here instead, to provide structural stability.

It’s interesting just how much a few changes can make a big difference when it comes to how different the Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pulse and the Sapphire RX 7700 XT PURE. They have nearly the same shroud and backplate design, even the line drawings are the same. But with the RX 7700 XT PURE being bright white and all of those accents changing from red to grey I like the RX 7700 XT PURE’s styling a lot more than the Pulse. It is also exciting to see Sapphire finally fully embracing the white PC build, a lot of the “white edition” models from other companies are limited runs and ask for a premium, I’m not expecting that to be the case with the RX 7700 XT PURE. The only downside aesthetically for me was the red up on top of the card as well as the lighting being red. White or RGB would better fit the white card, but the way the lighting lights up and in some areas glows through the white card looks great. Having lighting that covered the entire top would look better, however, not just a hotspot in the middle. The RX 7700 XT PURE didn’t have as large of an overclock as we saw with the XFX QICK 7700 XT Black but with its mid-range overclock it held its own in our testing, coming out on top compared to the other RX 7700XTs more than it should. That means of course that the RX 7700 XT PURE outperformed the 4060 Ti 8GB in nearly every test by a big margin and even outperformed cards like the RTX 3070 Ti as well. This translates to great 1440p performance and at least some capabilities at 4K. What impressed me more than anything was how well the RX 7700 XT PURE performed in our cooling tests, its mid-range overclock combined with a capable cooler had it running cooler than almost any other card tested. Its noise results were great as well, especially in our under-load test that replicates what you can expect in heavy game use. Like with the other 7700 XT the RX 7700 XT PURE did struggle in our Blender benchmarks and still has room to improve when it comes to ray tracing performance compared with Nvidia. The RX 7700 XT PURE uses standard PCIe power connections, so you can avoid having to use an adapter or having to upgrade your power supply which can save some money if you already have a PSU. For pricing, Sapphire has the RX 7700 XT PURE priced at $469. The base MSRP of the RX 7700 XT is $449 and the premium for an overclocked card with a larger cooler isn’t too bad at just $20. The big problem however is just how close the RX 7700 XT and the RX 7800 XT are pricing-wise with the 7800 XT’s base MSRP at $499. This makes it hard to justify the 7700 XT and even harder as the prices get closer to the 7800 XT MSRP. Hopefully, this will be adjusted in the future, especially with the RX 7700 XT PURE because it is an amazing card. The RX 7700 XT PURE is the sweet spot 7700 XT with the looks, cooling and noise performance, and is overclocked.

With any new model of GPU, there’s always the unexpected as even us as reviewers don’t know what to expect until we’ve tested it and yes while the likes of AMD will show you their own tests, they can generally be taken with a pinch of salt and should be ignored….to a degree. Luckily as we’ve seen from our main RX 7700 XT content, the GPU is good and offers a strong proposition at a good price though, even if the 7800 XT is the one we’d choose and the same can be said about new models from AIB partners which is what the Pure card from Sapphire is. A new untried, untested model. Again though, coming into it not having any idea on what to expect, and being shown some very respectable figures in terms of cooling performance, fan speed and board power, while also looking absolutely amazing. Now I’ll be honest, I’ve been a long-term fan of Sapphire going all the way back to the start of the 2000’s and looking back now, the designs were, shall we say…interesting. They’ve released some great products over the years, and also some not-so-favourable ones too, but the Pure is definitely up there with the best of them and is a bold move that I really think will pay off for them. There aren’t too many brands who make white graphics cards and when they do, they typically go full white with a white cooler, backplate and PCB but Sapphire hasn’t done that. While they’ve gone for two out of the three, they left the PCB black, and I’m not even mad because you can’t see it anyway because the cooler and backplate are that big, and encompass the whole card so you don’t end up seeing the PCB and by keeping it black, it helps to keep costs down and I’m all for that. I honestly can’t wait to see more models sporting the Pure cooler to see how it can potentially handle something a bit beefier like the 7900 XTX GPU, with my only real gripe being to do with that red piece of plastic and red LED, but luckily, the LED can be turned off.