Packaging

The Card

Sapphire is introducing a new design theme for the Nitro of this generation. The main color is gray, but there are several highlights. The backplate is attached magnetically and is used to cover the power connector area and hide the cables—great idea!


The cover is made from thick metal and uses a tool-free magnetic attachment mechanism.


Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1585 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 64 mm. You can really fit an addon card in the free slot—I tested it.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1b and two HDMI 2.1b. With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, who would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but have math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


The card uses a single 16-pin connector, which is located near the back of the card, a much better location than along the side like on the various NVIDIA cards.


This adapter cable is included in the box, to convert three 8-pins into a 16-pin.


Sapphire has installed an RGB lighting zone along the top edge of the card.


This connector is used to synchronize the lighting of your system with the graphics card.

Teardown

The plastic frame goes off first, it helps reinforce the card against bending, too.


Sapphire made the fan assembly removable, without touching the thermal paste. This can come in handy if you have to replace one of the fans after a few years.


Under the main cooler a reinforcement frame has been placed.


Sapphire's cooler uses six heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.