Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse Slides Down to $800 Following TechPowerUp Review

[btarunr]

Days following its TechPowerUp review where we noted its rather high $860 street price compared to several other custom-design RX 7900 XT graphics cards in the market, the Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse by Sapphire, has seen a price correction. The card is now listed at $820 on American online retailer Newegg, with a -$20 coupon bringing it down to $800. At this price, the RX 7900 XT Pulse matches other cost-effective custom designs, such as the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming, and XFX RX 7900 XT Speedster Merc 310. Most premium custom-design RX 7900 XT cards have settled around the $850-mark. These include the ASRock RX 7900 XT Taichi, MSI RX 7900 XT Gaming Trio Classic, and the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Hellhound OC.

There are still a few cards that are either at the launch MSRP of $900 or beyond. These include the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XT OC, Sapphire RX 7900 XT NITRO+, and the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Red Devil OC. The ideal price for the RX 7900 XT is exactly where the market is driving it to (at or under $800), as it is under pressure from the RTX 4070 Ti. Some of the priciest RX 7900 XT cards comically overlap with the prices of the cheapest RX 7900 XTX.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Chrispy_]

Good to see.
There's never any valid reason for a lower-tier product to have worse performance/$ than a higher-tier part these days.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

The only problem is even at 800 the 7900XT isn't very appealing.... Maybe vs a 4070ti I guess....

 

[Chrispy_]

The only problem is even at 800 the 7900XT isn't very appealing.... Maybe vs a 4070ti I guess....

Absolutely.

All this fixes is the broken hierarchy where the lower-tier product is finally better value than the flagship again (barely, but at least it's not actually wrong anymore). However, Every 40-series from Nvidia and 70-series from AMD has been objectively bad value. Not just bad value because the performance/$ is always poor at the highest tiers, but also bad value compared to the higher-tier cards from last generation. 4070Ti and 7900XT aren't doing well against clearance of old stock - Newegg was selling 3080 FE cards new for $420 a couple of weeks back. You've also been able to pick up brand new 6900XT cards for sub-$600 for a long time now.

I'm all about the price/performance "sweet spot" with hardware and nothing has launched this generation that satisfies that. As I said in the original Pulse 7900XT review, I picked up a 6800XT for significantly less than half the price of a 7900XT and it's only ~25% slower than the 7900XT/4070Ti in most games. I'm playing at 1440p120 most of the time and you just don't need a lot more than that. It's also not much of an image quality upgrade to go from 1440p to 4K. Sure, there's a bit of sharpness gain, but even with a 7900XT/4070Ti you'll probably still need to use FSR/DLSS to hit 4K120 which means you're losing that sharpness just about everywhere except the HUD and UI when things are in motion.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Absolutely.

All this fixes is the broken hierarchy where the lower-tier product is finally better value than the flagship again (barely, but at least it's not actually wrong anymore). However, Every 40-series from Nvidia and 70-series from AMD has been objectively bad value. Not just bad value because the performance/$ is always poor at the highest tiers, but also bad value compared to the higher-tier cards from last generation. 4070Ti and 7900XT aren't doing well against clearance of old stock - Newegg was selling 3080 FE cards new for $420 a couple of weeks back. You've also been able to pick up brand new 6900XT cards for sub-$600 for a long time now. As I said in the original Pulse 7900XT review, I picked up a 6800XT for significantly less than half the price of a 7900XT and it's only ~25% slower in most games.

I'm all about the price/performance "sweet spot" with hardware and nothing has launched this generation that satisfies that.

I personally don't really care about price/performance but I still dislike when products launch that are worse than the previous generation especially when they are not the flagship halo card. My 4090 being 1600+ is whatever (1200 usd would have been nice though) nothing else offers it's performance but AMD/Nvidia trying to sell what should be upper mid range to entry level high end parts for 800+ I can't get behind. At this rate entry level parts are going to be 500 usd smh and offer almost nothing over previous generation 4-500 usd parts.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

But but, erm, research, aftermarket cooler, warranties, superior components... etc etc. How come the price can drop all of a sudden? /s

 

[bonehead123]

Good to see.
There's never any valid reason for a lower-tier product to have worse performance/$ than a higher-tier part these days.

Sure there is...

Cause they know there will almost always be a certain number of (under-educated) schmucks out there that will buy them, regardless, hehehehe

 

[Minus Infinity]

The only problem is even at 800 the 7900XT isn't very appealing.... Maybe vs a 4070ti I guess....

Especially since this card should have been called the 7800XT and the 7900XTX is the real 7900XT. $200 more for a 6800XT replacement sucks But AMD is ready to offer you the 6700XT replacement as a 7800XT for $699+ and so on. Still not as insane as 4070 at $750, but RDNA3 costs a lot less to manufacture than Ada and rather than hammering Nvidia on price they are just trying to offer a bit better value..

 

[Crackong]

At 749 I would buy one.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Especially since this card should have been called the 7800XT and the 7900XTX is the real 7900XT. $200 more for a 6800XT replacement sucks But AMD is ready to offer you the 6700XT replacement as a 7800XT for $699+ and so on. Still not as insane as 4070 at $750, but RDNA3 costs a lot less to manufacture than Ada and rather than hammering Nvidia on price they are just trying to offer a bit better value..

That's really all they've been doing for the last decade if anything they've been more reactive to Nvidia pricing like dropping the price of the 5700XT prior to launch when Nvidia announced the 2060/2070 super.

At 749 I would buy one.

749 for a custom card with decent thermals wouldn't be so bad at least it seems to be getting there.

 

[R33mba]

I don't know power consuption and high temps really bother me at 7900xt, but again 12gb of 4070ti vram bothers me the same