Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT Review

Designed to be the ultimate 1080p GPU, the RX 5600 XT graphics card arrives on the scene – taking on the GTX 1660 Ti and maybe even the RTX 2060.

Product on Review: Pulse RX 5600 XT 6GB
Manufacturer & Sponsor: Sapphire
Street Price: £255 GBP – $279 USD

Having already released the RX 5500 and RX 5700, it was only a matter of time before we saw AMD push the RX 5600 out. Over in the NVIDIA camp we’ve seen a smattering of GPUs hit the market, covering all eventualities and price-points; a pre-emptive move which intended to deliver a crushing defeat in the mid-range GPU segment.

Prior to the RX 5600 XT, AMD claimed that their RX 5600 XT would easily compete with NVIDIA’s GTX 1660 Ti. Where the 1660 Ti struggled to achieve an average of 60 FPS at 1080p Ultra, the 5600 XT should pull through and deliver in excess of 60 FPS.

So, the RX 5600 XT can be regarded as the 1080p champion in AMD’s lineup – allowing gamers to max out on their detail preset at while still enjoying more than playable frame-rates. Today, we’ll be exploring what the Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT has to offer, with its factory overclock and Dual-X cooling.

Prior to the RX 5600 XT launch, NVIDIA dropped the price of the RTX 2060 to around the $299 USD marker, putting this particular card within reach in terms of pricing and possibly performance.

Can the RX 5600 XT take on the GTX 1660 Ti, and perhaps even the RTX 2060? Let’s find out!

Sapphire on their Pulse 5600 XT

The SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 5600 XT offers incredible performance at the optimal budget for every gamer. With lightning fast GDDR6 memory and redefined display and media engines, the PULSE RX 5600 XT is the ideal graphics card for 1080p gamers. It is powered by AMD’s extreme RDNA architecture, alongside our innovative Dual-X Cooling Technology which keeps the GPU, Memory and VRM components icy cool at low noise levels. The all-aluminum backplate preserves the rigidity of the GPU and guarantees nothing bends, dust stays out and adds another level of passive cooling to dissipate heat. Pivotal SAPPHIRE features like the Quick Connect Fan, Dual Bios Support and Dual Ball Bearing Fans keep your GPU running smooth and stable. Take your gaming to the next level with the SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 5600 XT as the beating heart of your PC!

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RX 5600 XT supplied directly by Sapphire:

GPU
Navi 14 XLE
Stream Processor
2304
Video Memory
6GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
192-bit
Engine Clock Boost
1750MHz
Memory Clock
14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Dual-Fan
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
250 x 46 x 120 mm

Closer Look Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video of Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 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 5600 XT 6GB
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 very quiet graphics card – even under performance mode we found it to be a low-noise solution.

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.

DX11: 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

Initially, the RX 5600 XT was touted as a rival to the GTX 1660 Ti but this new GPU has the prowess to go up against the RTX 2060. RX 5600 XT can easily take on the GTX 1660 Ti and is an easy recommendation for those in the market for a graphics card capable of 1080p with all the bells and whistles (max. detail preset).

If we take the Sapphire Pulse on its own, we’re presented with an attractive looking card which boasts an impressive cooling configuration, capable of providing good thermal results and low-noise too. The ability to switch out the cooling fans isn’t anything new to Sapphire graphics cards but it’s a novel idea and is a handy attribute to have.

Priced at £255 GBP / $279 USD, the RX 5600 XT represents decent value for money – undercutting the RTX 2060 and yet supplying very similar performance results; something which NVIDIA will surely be concerned about!

If you game at 1080p and want all the eye candy then the RX 5600 XT is currently the best option for the task!

Pros
+ Pleasing on the eye
+ Low-noise cooling solution
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Cooling fans can be switched out
+ Dual-Bios switch for lower noise
+ Excellent 1080p performance
+ Matches the RTX 2060 in performance

Cons
– Power efficiency could be better

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Join in with the discussions on Discord