Packaging

The Card

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pulse uses the same cooling design style as the company's RX 7600 Pulse, which was released not long ago. You get a minimalist red-on-black color scheme, just like on the other cards of the series. There's no fancy RGB lighting to be had, whatever visual uplift is from the design itself. The cooler shroud is made of plastic, but the backplate is metal.


Dimensions of the card are 28.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 999 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. The card's width is 52 mm.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and two HDMI 2.1a (same as RDNA 2).

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with two independent hardware units that can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. There's support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


All AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT designs use dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Teardown

Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pulse exudes simplicity, so taking it apart is pretty straightforward. The cooler shroud comes off more easily than the rest of the heatsink, so you can clean its fans without having to take the whole cooler apart (and disturb the TIM or thermal pads).


The main heatsink uses a copper base, paired with four heatpipes. It also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.