Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT Review

AMD’s mid-range Navi graphics cards are finally here, in the form of the RX 5500 XT. In this review we take a look at the Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT and see how it compares to the NVIDIA GTX 16 Series.

Product on Review: Pulse RX 5500 XT 4GB
Manufacturer & Sponsor: Sapphire
Street Price: £170 GBP – $170 USD

After the success of the AMD RX 5700 Series, AMD are back again today with another Navi-based GPU to accommodate the mid-range. The RX 5500 Series is highly anticipated, and not just by gamers and avid enthusiasts. The sheer number of NVIDIA GTX 16 Series launches signifies a level of uncertainty.

Under consideration today we have the Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT 4GB which boasts the Dual-X cooling solution seen on other graphics cards in Sapphire’s portfolio. AMD are releasing 4GB and 8GB versions of the RX 5500 XT, the latter offering higher performance at 1080p with the possibility to utilise higher detail presets.

Who will take the 1080p crown? Does AMD have what it takes to triumph over NVIDIA’s GTX 16 Series? Let’s find out!

Sapphire on their Pulse graphics cards

Whether you’re new to PC gaming or you’re looking to push your existing rig forward, the SAPPHIRE Pulse range has everything that a modern gamer needs. Featuring a range of high performance cards to match your budget so that you can game the way that you want to without breaking the bank. Pulse products have great performance and are engineered to last. All SAPPHIRE PULSE cards come with the performance parts you need for an excellent gaming experience at a price you can afford.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RTX 5500 XT supplied directly by Sapphire:

GPU
Navi 14 XTX
Stream Processor
1408
Video Memory
4GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
128-bit
Engine Clock Boost
1845MHz
Memory Clock
14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
450W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Dual-Fan
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
220 x 40 x 120 mm

Closer Look Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video of Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT. In this video we go into great detail about this graphics card, walking you through all of the features and detaching the cooler for a look at the thermal solution and innards. View the video here or watch below:

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
ZOTAC GTX 1660 SUPER Twin Fan
INNO3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2
ASUS GTX 1660 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1050
Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT 4GB
AMD RX 590
AMD RX 580
AMD RX 570

Special thanks go to Avermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Apex Legends
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018
Battlefield V

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

ACOUSTICS

Pulse is a low-noise graphics card. Under the performance mode we found the cooler would operate around 1250RPM throughout gaming sessions, creating very little noise at all.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Apex Legends

Apex Legends is a free-to-play battle royale game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. Set in the same universe as Titanfall, the game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on February 4, 2019.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

DX12: Battlefield V

Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. Battlefield V is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

After eagerly waiting for the AMD RX 5700 Series, we’re left in no doubt of its potential as a mid-range alternative to the NVIDIA GTX 16 Series.

Up against the GTX 1650 SUPER and GTX 1660, the RX 5500 XT does an admirable job. We’ve been testing out the 4GB version today but the 8GB version will elevate the performance further and allow for even more eye-candy when the detail preset is increased in-game.

Sapphire’s Pulse offering under the guise of the RX 5500 XT provides a low-noise solution, which also delivers confidently under pressure in terms of thermal prowess. Visually, we really like the design, it cuts out the RGB and simply puts forward a stylish graphics card that will match up with other components very well.

The ability to easily detach each of the fans from Pulse is a novel idea which is practical for monthly maintenance but also gives the option to customise with another cooling fan.

The RX 5500 XT has a base MSRP of $169 for 4GB and $199 for 8GB. This positions the XT right in between the GTX 1650 SUPER and GTX 1660, with custom designs costing upwards of these figures. We feel that the pricing needs to be lowered in order for AMD to remain competitive in the mid-range division.

If 1080p is the aim, the RX 5500 XT is a good option to go with. Pulse builds on a great GPU by offering a solid thermal design packed with useful features!

Pros
+ Attractive design without RGB
+ Can fit into smaller cases
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Low-noise cooler
+ Cooling fans can be switched out
+ Dual-Bios switch for lower noise
+ Great 1080p performance

Cons
– Pricing isn’t as competitive as hoped

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