Test Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: Cheap model from Sapphire, good features and price – 17

Conclusion

The crown went up again, so according to the current exchange rate (even if I take the pessimistic one), the price of the reference RX 7900 XTX comes out to some 27,300 crowns. Pulse is against it in our country currently about two thousand more expensiveand with such an additional fee, it already has a worse price/performance ratio than the reference RX 7900 XT starting at twenty-five thousand.

If I put a reference model against the Pulse RX 7900 XTX at a reference price, I’d say that paying an extra two thousand for a cooler to get an average card isn’t worth it. However, in contrast to the reference version, there should be no risk of problems with overheating with the classic heatpipes of the Pulse due to a defective vapor chamber, and the comparison is still rather hypothetical, because the models with the reference cooler are currently even more expensive in our country. The unavailability of the RX 7900 XTX drove the price higher than it should have been.

It can be assumed that with better availability, the price could drop to the recommended price, but at the same time, there is also the risk that we will not see a drop in prices. After the initial shock of the high prices of the new generation of cards, players have probably come to terms with them and are starting to buy in bulk. Cards are disappearing from stores faster than manufacturers can supply them.

On the other hand, you can get the competitive RTX 4080 for prices corresponding to the recommended ones, i.e. for 32,800 crowns. Even against Radeon with an additional charge, the RTX 4080 still fares worse in terms of price/performance ratio. This of course applies in the ideal scenario for Radeons – i.e. with classic rasterization or if you disable ray tracing and avoid DLSS 2 and DLSS 3. You will pay for it with higher consumption, compared to the RTX 4080 at the standard limit, the load power consumption is about 50 W higher. against the overclocked non-reference models, there is still a difference of around 30 W against the RX 7900 XTX.

If you don’t avoid DLSS 2 and 3, the RTX 4080 already has the upper hand even at a higher price. The older version of DLSS 2.x is supported by several times more games than FSR 2.x, and the first few games already support the generation of DLSS 3 images, for which AMD does not yet have an answer. With active ray tracing, GeForce gains the upper hand the more demanding effects the game uses. It can be assumed that the difficulty of the effects will increase rather than decrease, so the difference will increase over time. The RTX 4080 also often has larger coolers even with lower consumption, so they are better off with operational characteristics.

Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, 24 GB

If I had to briefly characterize the card in the Pulse design, it is a model offering the performance of overclocked models and small reserves of the cooler for clocking with average operating characteristics at an above-average price. Overall, it currently belongs to the most advantageous cards with a price tag below or around thirty thousand.

But it’s not for fans of really quiet cooling. The cooler does not even have large reserves for clocking with increasing voltage and thus consumption (average temperatures are not bad, but the temperature of the hotspot rises quickly and the fan speeds also increase significantly). It is known that the regulation setting in combination with the radiator throttles the performance. However, the drop in performance is not so great compared to overclocked models with a larger cooler that it is worth paying a few thousand extra just for it.

Also remember that the Pulse will want a well ventilated case. In the test set installed in the Arc XL big tower with seven fans, the cooler usually balanced on the noise limit for the fans (between 1800 and 1850 rpm), with intensive load the speed even went higher. If you click on the first chapter of the performance test with measurements from the F1 22 without ray tracing, you can see in the first half of the graph with the fan speed that it stays at this limit, but in the second part both the speed and the noise are already increasing. After turning on ray tracing, the speed already goes over 2000 rpm, and it’s even worse in smaller cases. Even with more powerful profiles in the drivers, the noise grew beyond the tolerable limit. I hope to get to the details in a separate article.

And I still have to mention the still unresolved problem with card consumption on the desktop in less common combinations of resolution and refresh rate or on different combinations of monitors. At 120 Hz at 4K, the memory still runs at maximum 3D clocks and the power consumption of the card itself is around 90 W, at 144 Hz at 900 MHz and the power consumption is around 65 W. But AMD promised a fix a month ago, so hopefully we will see it soon.

The Pulse RX 7900 XT from Sapphire is one of the cheapest RX 7900 XTX models. At the same time, it offers solid operating characteristics, does not suffer too much from the disadvantages of the cheapest models, the noise level of the card can be described as average. Therefore, for the mix of an attractive price/performance ratio and average operating characteristics, it receives a silver award, with the condition that, as availability improves, the price will drop close to the recommended 27,300 crowns. If, even with better availability, the surcharge would be two thousand against the cheapest models, it would rather be for bronze.

We thank the online store for lending the card for the test CZC.cz