It's been a while since the Radeon RX 5700 XT launched, and all vendors have had their custom designs out for a while. Now it looks like a second round of new designs that are more refined and tweaked to the max are incoming. The Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition is such a model. Sapphire took the extremely successful Nitro+ and bumped up the clock speeds for both GPU and memory. With a maximum boost clock of 2035 MHz, the card is the fastest air-cooled RX 5700 XT on the market; only the watercooled PowerColor Liquid Devil is clocked higher. What is unique to the Nitro+ SE is that its memory is overclocked, too. At this time, it's the only card available that's not running default memory clocks—some easy additional performance gained, I wonder why only so few manufacturers have the balls to include factory overclocked memory.

Performance of the Sapphire Nitro+ SE is great, beating the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT reference design by 5%, which makes the card faster than the GTX 1080 Ti and just 1% slower than AMD's Radeon VII flagship. NVIDIA's RTX 2070 Super is only 3% ahead, and the RTX 2080 is 12% faster. Compared to the RTX 2070, the Sapphire card is 9% faster, and the RX 5700 non-XT is over 15% behind. With these performance characteristics, we ran easily recommend the Radeon RX 5700 XT for 1440p gaming in all titles. Averaged over our 22 game-strong test suite, the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition achieved 96 FPS at 1440p.

In the initial Nitro+ review I was impressed by Sapphire's thermal solution, so it's not surprising that they kept it without any modifications. The large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler delivers good temperatures of 73°C and excellent noise levels that are among the quietest of the twelve (!) RX 5700 XT cards I've tested so far. Compared to the non-Special Edition card, Sapphire ensured that noise levels are unchanged (good), while allowing slightly higher temperatures to handle the card's increased heat output. I have to admit that I'm positively surprised that such a highly overclocked card can still run quietly—other vendors have failed here in the past. Should you want even quieter, Sapphire has you covered. The card has a dual-BIOS feature; the second BIOS is called "quiet mode" and runs the fans at even lower speed that reach 31 dBA. This makes the card the second-quietest RX 5700 XT we ever tested, just a little bit behind the PowerColor Red Devil. Memory temperatures are the best of all the cards we've reviewed by quite some margin even with the memory overclocked. It seems the additional heatsink for memory and VRM has been engineered really well to bring down temperatures. As expected, Sapphire includes the idle-fan-stop feature with the Nitro+ SE, which completely shuts off the fans during idle, desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming.

A noteworthy innovation is the "software BIOS switch" feature. Unlike all other dual-BIOS cards which use a physical BIOS switch, Sapphire lets you control the BIOS selection through their TRIXX software. If you prefer the manual method, you can still toggle between both BIOSes—the switch has three positions. A small oversight is that there seems to be no way for TRIXX to know when you've manually switched away from the "software switch" setting, so it will still show you the software BIOS switch option even though you've forced the switch into manual selection mode, which could lead to some confusion. Just to clarify, this feature does not use SoftPowerPlay Tables or flash the BIOS every time you switch. The card has an additional electrical switch circuit that is controlled by this feature, which selects the BIOS chip that is "connected". The switching is instant (so you can flash without a reboot), but the GPU/driver re-reads the BIOS only during system startup.

Power consumption of the Sapphire Nitro+ Special Edition is around 70 W higher than the AMD reference card, which is quite a lot. Operating the card at the higher clocks on both GPU and memory increased power consumption significantly, which is as expected because you're no longer operating the hardware at its optimum efficiency point. The good thing is that Sapphire has paired their card with a powerful cooler, so the increased heat output won't negatively affect temperatures or noise levels. The card sees a 25% loss in power efficiency compared to the reference design, which is among the highest of all RX 5700 XT reviews.

Manual overclocking of the Nitro+ SE worked very well, reaching the top GPU overclock out of all our RX 5700 XT cards. It looks like Sapphire has definitely been binning the best GPUs for their Special Edition. Overall overclocking performance gains on Navi are limited though, most of the cards are within 1-2% FPS of each other when overclocked as far as they go.

Sapphire does have a unique feature for their new Navi graphics cards called "TriXX Boost". It's a new capability of their TriXX overclocking software and lets you precisely set a custom resolution (in small steps) that's active system-wide. That new resolution can now be selected in your games and nets you higher FPS with a small loss in image quality due to the lower rendering resolution. Paired with Radeon Image Sharpening, this can help improve performance without compromising image quality too much.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ Special Edition is already listed online for $480, which is not cheap. You can find many RX 5700 XT cards for around $400—20% cheaper. Even though the Sapphire SE is highly overclocked out of the box, the 5% performance improvement alone can't justify the cost increase. The cooler is much better, probably the best of all the RX 5700 XTs out there, so that has to count for something, too. With the Nitro+ Special Edition, Sapphire is including three ARGB fans preinstalled on the card, which cost around $30–$40 when you buy them separately, so if you want those fancy fans, it's actually cheaper to buy the SE instead of the regular Nitro+ plus the ARGB fans. Personally, I still find the price a bit steep, maybe Black Friday will bring it down a little bit. At $460 or so, the Nitro+ SE would dial up the heat under the competition. NVIDIA's RTX 2070 Super is a noteworthy alternative in this segment if you are willing to spend $500 for slightly higher performance with better power efficiency, but less bling.