While not a reference card, it’s not overly far from it, given it’s one of the more basic Sapphire designs. That being said, and I’ve said this for many years, Sapphire makes the best AMD cards and I’ve always put my own money towards Sapphire any time I go AMD. This isn’t a particularly new design either, the Pulse aesthetic was similar to this back on the RX580 I had, but hey, it still looks great and I’m loving the classic PC gaming black and red too.
The fans use a 9-blade design, but if you look closer, the blades are all joined at the tips much like the Axiel fans that ASUS uses, as this helps push more air down into the heatsink and not out to the side.
The card had a good size radiator with plenty of fins, but it’s not overly densely packed so airflow shouldn’t need to be too aggressive to cool it. You can see it’s equipped with some fairly significant heatpipes too.
AMD is still sticking with the old school connectors for now too, which makes things easy for those on older PSUs.
The backplate looks awesome, with the iconic Pluse logo right along the spine, which looks pretty damn cool. the metalwork is great too, with lots of ventilation to prevent unwanted hot spots, and a bit of a card extension on the back, allowing for a radiator that’s longer than the PCB.
The GPU bracket is accessible without removing the plate too, which can make maintenance a lot easier if you ever need to open it up.
Plus, all the main screws are within easy reach and just a standard Philips fitting, which is nice.
At the back, there are three DisplayPorts and a single HDMI. Here you can also see the card isn’t particularly wide either, extending just a little beyond the PCIe bracket, and sitting com
With the heatsink removed everything looks pretty familiar, they’re not reinventing the wheel here, but I can see four memory chips, and there’s certainly room for a few more should they push to a 16GB version in the near future.
As you can see, the radiator is split into multiple sections, with three large heat pipes helping distribute the heat to the front, mid and rear sections of the radiator. Plus, there’s a thick thermal material that covers the VRM and the RAM, with a nice and clean application of thermal paste for the chipset.
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