Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition

[W1zzard]

Sapphire's RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition is the fastest air-cooled Radeon RX 5700 XT on the market. It has what no other card has: overclocked memory. Noise levels and thermals of the adjustable RGB fans are impressive. Does it beat the PowerColor Red Devil?

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[Anymal]

First GCN was not introduced 2013 as you stated in beginning of the review.

 

[nguyen]

So instead of buying a heater for the winter and a normal 5700XT you could buy this...noice

 

[Jism]

Why is there no threadripper review on this website?

Apart from that, only if you like silent operation of a card, a 5700XT of AMD itself is already maxed out as far as it can.

 

[W1zzard]

Why is there no threadripper review on this website?

They told me they don't enough samples

 

[Shatun_Bear]

Hopefully the 3950X review is coming, if not the TR3000 CPUs.

 

[notb]

So it's actually even less sensible than Radeon VII. Amazing.

Clearly, Sapphire wasn't really interested in competing with Nvidia-based competition or making a good all-rounder.
They wanted to make the fastest AMD card available. Because that's enough. Because consumers are so polarized that there's a large enough group that won't tolerate a Green chip.

Sick.

 

[Thuban]

A friend lent me his STRIX 2080 Ti for a week, and this thing has similar power requirements.

Just sad, really. Who is buying this over a regular Pulse?

First GCN was not introduced 2013 as you stated in beginning of the review.

Around 2012 I believe. Another question, how many rebrands GCN 1.0 has seen

 

[Fluffmeister]

Damn this thing sucks power, lets hope RDNA2 is a big enough tweak to get power comsuption in check to compete with Nvidia on an older node.

 

[kings]

Needs more power than a 2080Ti, to be just 5% faster than a reference RX 5700XT.

I don't know what Sapphire is trying to achieve with this...

 

[joemama]

That power consumption is crazy, almost enough to replace your heater

 

[Xzibit]

That power consumption is crazy, almost enough to replace your heater

If you have a latest gen Intel using MCE or try'n to get 5ghz you'll be used to it.

 

[Thuban]

I don't know what Sapphire is trying to achieve with this...

Winter... X-mas soon

 

[Chrispy_]

$80 extra and 30% more power consumption for 5% more performance?

You can take a $399 variant and get a similar overclock for free. Sure, there's more headroom in the Nitro+ SE but it already uses 285W just at factory clocks!

If you have the extra $480 you could just pick up a 2070 Super instead which is faster, uses far less power, and has hardware raytracing support. Newegg US has a Gigabyte triple-fan factory overclocked 2070S for $468 right now, $448 if you successfully apply the $20 rebate card. Yeah, it's a special offer but that's because the 2070Shas been out for 6 months already and you can always find at least one 2070S model for under MSRP, compared to this SE model that has just arrived and won't likely get discounts until the unsold stock has aged a bit on store shelves.

If you want a Navi card, buy a base-price one and undervolt it as far as you can go. You can expect to shave 20% off the power draw, heat, and fan noise without losing performance based on general forum reports. My own 5700XT is down by 25% power draw and it's only a reference model (actually, I just remembered I'm cheating because I capped the boost clock at 1850Mhz which is the average game clock, but that probably costs me a couple of percent in performance).

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

wonder if watercooling would be a cheaper option...

 

[notb]

$80 extra and 30% more power consumption for 5% more performance?

Yeah, because that's totally unheard of among overclockers.

You can take a $399 variant and get a similar overclock for free.
(...)
If you want a Navi card, buy a base-price one and undervolt it as far as you can go.

Not everyone overclocks or undervolts. Component makers also provide products for people who just want to put it in the case and play.

I don't know what Sapphire is trying to achieve with this...

Make the fastest AMD card available. And they did it, right?

 

[Chrispy_]

Not everyone overclocks or undervolts. Component makers also provide products for people who just want to put it in the case and play.

If that's the criteria these cards are judged by then they are abject failures; Power-hungry, large, heavy, and expensive (more expensive than superior alternatives) with abysmal performance/$ and performance/Watt. If people just want to put it in the case and play then they probably care about absolute performance and performance/$. A 20% price hike is 20% of the budget that could simply be spent on a faster card.

 

[INSTG8R]

If that's the criteria these cards are judged by then they are abject failures; Power-hungry, large, heavy, and expensive (more expensive than superior alternatives) with abysmal performance/$ and performance/Watt. If people just want to put it in the case and play then they probably care about absolute performance and performance/$. A 20% price hike is 20% of the budget that could simply be spent on a faster card.

And some of us just care about outright performance and could care less about power consumption. I mean it’s really a few bucks a year “extra” it’s funny how enthusiasts are suddenly ”power misers” and it’s become an “important metric” all of a sudden...

 

[Chrispy_]

And some of us just care about outright performance and could care less about power consumption. I mean it’s really a few bucks a year “extra” it’s funny how enthusiasts are suddenly ”power misers” and it’s become an “important metric” all of a sudden...

I don't think you understood my post.

For outright performance, buy a faster card than a 5700XT, period.

Are you saying you would rather pay $480 for this 5700XT than $448 for a factory-overclocked 2070 Super? In TPU's reviews, it performs 10-15% faster and that's even if you ignore all the other benefits like RTX, Turing NVEnc, CUDA support, lower power consumption, VRS shading, integer scaling blah blah blah.

I dislike Nvidia for plenty of reasons but the 5700XT is supposed to be significantly cheaper than the 2070S because it's simply not as good.

 

[notb]

If that's the criteria these cards are judged by then they are abject failures; Power-hungry, large, heavy, and expensive (more expensive than superior alternatives) with abysmal performance/$ and performance/Watt.

Correct.
If you haven't noticed, Nvidia has had 70% dGPU market share for a while - even when AMD offered better value with discounted Polaris.

If people just want to put it in the case and play then they probably care about absolute performance and performance/$. A 20% price hike is 20% of the budget that could simply be spent on a faster card.

But no AMD card is faster - that's the point.
Looking at all options we have today, this card makes very little sense (if any).
But if someone can only choose from AMD cards, a heavily overclocked 5700XT is the best thing he can buy today. That's it.

 

[Chrispy_]

But if someone can only choose from AMD cards, a heavily overclocked 5700XT is the best thing he can buy today. That's it.

You're not wrong, but I have issues with that statement.

What sort of real-world situation would mean someone can only choose from AMD cards? That's a pretty contrived scenario, especially given that these aren't going to be OEM models where you're limited to a selection - they're going to be available only as add-in upgrades through consumer retail channels.

Outside of personal boycotts and delusions of loyalty in a multi-billion dollar cutthroat duopoly, I can't think of one.

 

[INSTG8R]

You're not wrong, but I have issues with that statement.

What sort of real-world situation would mean someone can only choose from AMD cards? That's a pretty contrived scenario, especially given that these aren't going to be OEM models where you're limited to a selection - they're going to be available only as add-in upgrades through consumer retail channels.

Outside of personal boycotts and delusions of loyalty in a multi-billion dollar cutthroat duopoly, I can't think of one.

Easy I have Freesync 2 Monitor so from Vega my option right now is a 5700XT if I’m upgrading

 

[Chrispy_]

Easy I have Freesync 2 Monitor so from Vega my option right now is a 5700XT if I’m upgrading.

I guess you missed the huge news a while back; Nvidia caved and now support Freesync monitors on any Pascal or newer card.

I bought an RTX card in January to use with my Freesync monitor and it has been glorious.

 

[INSTG8R]

I guess you missed the huge news a while back; Nvidia caved and now support Freesync monitors on any Pascal or newer card.

I bought an RTX card in January to use with my Freesync monitor and it has been glorious.

Freesync 2 is a different animal than normal FreeSync it’s the equivalent of Gsync Ultimate. I’m not losing features because NV has random support that “may” work. Most of the latest titles literally have a FreeSync 2 preset that I take advantage of.

 

[Chrispy_]

Freesync 2 is a different animal than normal FreeSync it’s the equivalent of Gsync Ultimate. I’m not losing features because NV has random support that “may” work. Most of the latest titles literally have a FreeSync 2 preset that I take advantage of.

You mean like my Freesync HDR600 display that works perfectly with no missing features on my RTX card?

I'm honestly not sure if it's Freesync 2 or not (it's an import from Korea using an LG HDR panel) but it does VRR with LFC and whether I enable or disable HDR or not doesn't seem to affect VRR.

I have to admit, I've not seen a Freesync 2 preset but then again, I'm not playing any 2019 AAA titles at the moment.