I bought this video card recently. Here’s a mini review.
Fast and quiet GPU. Performance is good enough for any game. I’m playing mostly with 4k resolution, making use of FSR (resolution scaling), especially when FSR4 is supported. 16 GB VRAM is good for the future. FSR4 is a big upgrade over the previous version. Fans are almost inaudible. I wanted the 3 fan version, so it would be quieter. The lowest end “Pulse” has only 2 fans, which should be ok too. There’s LED lights, which I just disabled right away (I don’t care about LEDs). Pure is factory overclocked. Basically, it runs at the same clocks as stock RX 9070 XT, although with less cores it’s still a bit slower. On the other hand, TDP is lower as well. I actually wanted to see if I can underclock it back to “stock” 9070 levels, but that was not possible at least with the official tools.
Main drawback: there’s a little bit of coil whine, depending on FPS. It’s inaudible under 100 FPS. It gets more noticeable at 150 FPS and very noisy at 200 FPS. I tend to limit FPS to 120, so it’s usually not a problem, but I would be careful buying this video card for high FPS monitors (above 200).
Sapphire’s management utility “TriXX” is pretty limited, but does the job I guess. For this GPU, it has basic monitoring tools. You can find the same features and more in the AMD Adrenaline software, but TriXX is a bit lighter (Adrenaline is super heavy). There’s also some resolution scaling settings that I don’t really understand why would you need them? And I guess you can force and customize FSR for unsupported games.
This GPU does not have dual BIOS (usually for performance and silence), but it’s not really an issue, because the fans are so quiet by default. There’s also setting for “favor performance” vs. “favor efficiency” in AMD Adrenaline tools, which pretty much does the same thing. I don’t see a way to update the BIOS, but then again, I’ve never done it for previous GPUs either.
Pros
- Good price / performance
- 16 GB VRAM
- Quiet fans
Cons
- Coil whine with high FPS
- FSR not as widely supported as DLSS