The Card

The Sapphire Radeon RX 590 NITRO+ Special Edition earns its name from the frosty blue paintjob on the aluminium cooler shroud and backplate, which are a throwback to the olden days of Sapphire's signature blue color scheme. The fans aren't just blue, but will light up to any color in the RGB spectrum. The backplate fuses with the shroud, giving the card a solid industrial feel. The card is 26.5 cm long and 13.5 cm tall.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0b, and a dual-link DVI-D. The DVI connector has no analog wiring, so D-Sub dongles won't work and an active adapter has to be used.


The board uses a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


Sapphire includes a dual-BIOS feature with their card, which will prove handy when it comes to recovering from a failed BIOS flash. The default BIOS runs the GPU at 1560 MHz and the memory at 2100 MHz; the "quiet" BIOS has a quieter fan curve and runs the GPU at 1545 MHz and the memory at 2000 MHz.


The Radeon RX 590, like every other current AMD GPU, supports up to 4-way CrossFire X via PCIe.

Disassembly

Taking the Sapphire RX 590 NITRO+ apart is straightforward because there are no exotic screws in your way. The cooler shroud is very easy to separate from the heatsink, so you can periodically clean the fans and heatsink if you want.


The cooler features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with fins arranged such that air is guided along the front and back, rather than the sides. A copper base conducts heat from the GPU to four 8 mm-thick, nickel-plated copper heat pipes, which distribute heat across the fin stack. An secondary aluminium base pulls heat from the memory chips. Additional aluminium bases attached to the fin stack draw heat from the VRM MOSFETs.


The backplate comes with thermal pad behind the VRM area, which is a welcome move.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.