Overall and Final Verdict
Our look at the Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pulse is both a look at AMDs new 7700 XT GPU and at Sapphire card design as well. For the 7700 XT AMD has opted to not do a reference design so budget-focused cards like the RX 7700 XT Pulse are as close as you are going to get. They don’t have the all-metal fan shroud but Sapphire’s design is a great example of everything you need and nothing else. The Pulse card design isn’t bad looking and other than a few small accents printed on the shroud you aren’t getting a crazy over top design or any lighting at all. Not having lighting is going to be a big plus for some people and a downside for others. The overall card size isn’t as compact as some of the reference designs, but once you figure in your power connections on top the RX 7700 XT Pulse should fit in any of the same situations. It also uses standard PCIe power connections which means you won’t need to upgrade to a newer ATX 3.0 power supply if you already have one and can avoid the 12VHPWR adapters as well.
For performance, the RX 7700 XT Pulse isn’t sitting at the top of AMDs 1440p product stack but it does have solid 1440p performance. If anything at 1440p, unless you are trying to game at 240hz you won’t see much of a sacrifice compared to the 7800 XT, you lose 4K performance more than anything between the two cards. The RX 7700 XT Pulse leaves the RTX 4060 Ti in the dust for performance and even outperforms the RTX 3070 Ti as well as AMDs 6750 XT. It does have the same Blender performance issues that all of the AMD cards have. Its ray tracing performance is still behind where Nvidia is right now but AMD has made improvements there so the gap is smaller. Sapphire’s card design was quiet at 100% fan speed but when I got into the noise tests when under a normal load it was louder than I expected it to me, after seeing its cooling performance the fan profile could be tweaked slightly to even this out.
As for pricing, Sapphire has the RX 7700 XT Pulse priced at $449 which is right with AMDs RX 7700 XT MSRP, and the Pulse is the perfect card for an MSRP card with its stock clock speeds and only what you need design. But how does AMDs MSRP compare with the competition? Well if we are looking at just current generation cards from AMD and Nvidia the RX 7700 XT Pulse sitting at $449 the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB can be found at $399 and Nvidia has lowered the 16GB card down to $449. We don’t have a 16GB card to compare with but the RX 7700 XT Pulse as a whole was well ahead of the 4060 Ti. Nvidia’s last gen cards like the RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti get a little closer in performance but the RX 7700 XT Pulse was still ahead and while you can find a 3070 Ti at the same $449 price point they don’t completely line up. The RX 7700 XT Pulse gets the strongest competition from AMDs own cards with the 6800 XT that can be found for $499 and the 7800 XT as well at that same price. The pricing between the 7700 XT and the 7800 XT being so tight makes things tough as well once you start looking at any overclocked cards. They didn’t leave much room for a more premium 7700 XT to fit in at all. The 7700 XT Pulse also comes with a copy of Starfield Premium Edition as well which at a $99 value helps a lot if you were already considering getting the game.
Live Pricing: HERE
