Sapphire Nitro + Revision Radeon RX 5700 XT: Fast and almost flawless

It's a long time, but the custom graphics cards of the Radeon RX 5700 XT series are finally starting to flow. We are now focusing on the $ 440 Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX 5700 XT built around the more powerful version of AMD's two "Navi" GPUs and Sapphire's custom Nitro + design.

The wait for these more resistant kit pieces was worth it. Just last week, we had seen the rival of XFX, the Radeon RX 5700 XT Thicc II Ultra, falling in love with its beautiful design, evoking classic cars. Like a real hot rod, he was handsome and fast, but also ran a bit hard and needed to tinker for optimum performance. It was slightly flawed but quite impressive.

The Saphir Nitro + Radeon RX 5700 XT is almost flawless. It's hard to envision a more complete custom design for enthusiasts. And with the help of some ingenious Sapphire can even catapult Nitro +'s performance into another category, confronting Nvidia's formidable GeForce RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti for hundreds of dollars less. Let's go!

Saphir Nitro + Radeon RX 5700 XT: features, prices and properties

Sapphire's graphics card adds an overclocked, highly customized touch to AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT "Navi" GPU, and then pushes it further with some clever software tricks and optional upgrades.

The Navi chips of this generation are packed with advanced features: these are the first mainstream GPUs built using the 7nm manufacturing process, the first to support the super fast PCI 4.0 interface (if you associate it with a Ryzen 3000 processor and an X570 motherboard), and the first GPUs created with AMD's new underlying "RDNA" graphics architecture. The combination of RDNA and 7nm has significantly improved the energy efficiency of Radeon GPUs, and the RX 5700 Series offers a lot better in games that strongly favored Nvidia's GeForce graphics cards. AMD has also introduced useful software tips, such as Radeon Image Sharpening, to optimize the performance of your hardware (which Sapphire exploits to its advantage with its Trixx Boost software, although Navi do not supports real-time ray tracing, such as the GeForce RTX 20 series.

This review focuses on the custom modifications and performance of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX 5700 XT. Here is an overview of the specifications of the Radeon RX 5700 series compared to the latest generation Radeon Vega GPUs for you to take action:

AMD

And here is an overview of the specifications of Sapphire Nitro +:

Sapphire

As for the unpublished statistics, the biggest change in the Sapphire Nitro + is in clock speeds, offering a considerable jump in raw frequencies. Nitro + based the clock speed is faster than that of the reference RX 5700 XT Game the clock speed, which corresponds to the minimum clock speed expected in gaming workloads. The Nitro + ranked game clock lands north of 1900 MHz and, in practice, she was further improved in the games. This thing is quickly-And the company's innovative "Trixx Boost" software can push it to new heights if you are willing to accept a minimal resolution drop. More on that after our game benchmarks later.

Getting so much performance from AMD's "Navi" GPUs is not easy. Sapphire has replaced the power connectors on the 6-pin and 8-pin reference board with two 8-pin connectors, and has equipped the Nitro + with the company's most advanced custom cooling solution, Tri-X.

Brad Chacos / IDG

Tri-X incorporates a trio of fans in the stylish aluminum shroud and silver card. The two largest outdoor fans rotate normally, while the smaller indoor fans rotate in the opposite direction "to increase the flow of wind under the fans". Sapphire says that this system, coupled with the tunnels' tunnel curve themselves, increases' airflow convection 'make sure Tri-X cooling is a low-temperature, low-noise cooling solution . "In our tests, we found that everything was fine, because the Nitro + is much colder than the reference design and remains silent under load, the fan speed never exceeding 1800 rpm. For comparison, the most audible fans of the XFX Thicc II Ultra run from 2100 to 2300 rpm.

New for Radeon RX 5700 series Nitro + models, Sapphire now offers upgraded ARGB fans, increasing fan health monitoring and Nitro Glow RGB control functions that it was to develop in the company's Trixx software. The upgrade kit costs $ 30 and includes a pair of 95mm fans and a smaller 87mm indoor fan. All you have to do is unscrew the existing fans and then slide the new ones.

Sapphire

Customizable lighting is an important goal for Nitro +. You'll find the standard RGB LEDs embedded in the Sapphire logo on the side of the card, but Sapphire has also added a host of RGB lights on the edge and in the logo on the metal back plate of the card, which glow in a striking way . rainbow pattern by default. If you prefer to synchronize RGB lighting with your motherboard, Sapphire has added an addressable 3-pin header at the bottom of the board. After you have plugged into an RGB header on your motherboard, you can choose to let your motherboard software control the RGBs of the graphics card inside Trixx.

Premium touches like this are what distinguish the Nitro + range from the more economical Sapphire GPUs, such as the superb Pulse Radeon RX 5700.

Brad Chacos / IDG

The Sapphire design is not quite flash, though. This is a multi-legged graphics card, thanks to a massive heat sink and extended four heat pipes under the silver fairing. In fact, the aileron stack extends beyond the Nitro + circuit board and backplate. Sapphire further strengthened its board with VRM cooling and dedicated memory, fuse protection, more efficient and energy efficient Black Diamond coils and a 7 + 1 + 2 phase digital power supply for better overclocking performance. The Nitro + is delivered fully charged.

Another interesting touch: the Sapphire goes beyond the dual BIOS switch which is rather common among the high-end custom cards, adding a third parameter. The first two do what you expect, from the default high performance mode to a secondary profile that reduces the speed of acoustics. But the third is interesting: it lets you control one of these two BIOS profiles that you use in Sapphire's Trixx software, eliminating the need to force the side panel of your enclosure and manually switch a switch.

Sapphire

Easy? Sure. But I like to see improvements in the quality of life like this, and this highlights how much additional utility Sapphire has managed to compress intro into Trixx for this new generation of Radeon, driven by the enhancement feature of Trixx Boost performance. Let's take this to the test stand!

Next page: Our test system, the game tests start