Sapphire 7900 XTX Nitro+ Review

Cooling

So looking at a small selection of games, it’s clear to see that what Sapphire has done with the 7900 XTX has paid off as it leads the pack, and in one game, matched the RTX 4080, while also beating it in the 1% lows which is pretty impressive. It also pushes far ahead of the reference 7900 XTX card from AMD but you will be expected to pay a premium over that for the Nitro+.

Gaming performance to one side, the thing that I and I’m sure you are most interested in is the cooling performance, of which we’ve had some strong numbers from a variety of cards already, so the Sapphire has some big boots to fill.

What we saw here was during a run of F1 22 was the GPU temperature sat at around 64 degrees, while the memory junction temperature hovered between 84 to 86 degrees. The all-important hot spot temperature remained pretty consistent at 81 degrees all while boosting to levels exceeding 2600MHz. The total board power was just above 400 Watts, all while the fans remained pretty silent around 1500 RPM.

Overclocking

Now in terms of overclocking. If you’ve seen our other content on other models from various AIB’s, you’ll know that RDNA 3 is a bit of a weird one when it comes to overclocking, because instead of just finding the maximum speed, it’s a bit more complex than that and through our own findings, we increased the power limit by 15%, undervolted the voltage by 50mV and then looked to increase both the max frequency slightly, as well as the memory frequency, now sitting at 2700MHz. What this allows to happen, is to keep temperatures in check, while also giving a large boost range for the card to have a little more headroom.

By pushing the card to these limits, this resulted in a GPU temperature around 49 degrees, and a memory junction temperature of 74 degrees. The hotspot temperature peaked at 73 degrees but while this all sounds amazing, the fan speed did increase to beyond 3000RPM, but, and it’s a big but, as this isn’t the first time we’ve experienced this, as we had similar issues with our XFX card and put it down to a dodgy driver or an issue with the card, but seeing the same behavior here, does point the finger a little more at AMD and something more underlying going on and not an issue with Sapphire cards, or our particular sample.

To combat this, based on what Sapphire told us, we kept our overclocking settings the same, but reduced our fan speed and locked it into place at 45% though the AMD settings.

What this resulted in was a GPU temperature of 63 degrees, and a memory junction temperature of 88 degrees, while the hot spot rose to around 84 degrees, which is significantly less than the 92 degrees on the PowerColor card. This meant that our card managed to boost to a whopping 2800MHz at points while the power sat at around 464 Watts, and with our fixed fan profile, the fans remained extremely quiet at less than 1600 RPM, though we are told the fans should remain a little under this, even when overclocked.

In games, this means we now see both the Sapphire and XFX cards battling things out quite fiercely, only separated by 2 FPS in the 1% lows, but still showing a % increase over its stock performance, which was already ahead of the reference card, now putting it 13% faster than AMD’s own model.

In Cyberpunk, the Sapphire card takes our top spot of the 7900 XTX cards with a just under 3% lead compared to its stock performance, and the overclocked performance of the XFX Merc 310 card that we looked at. The only strange thing here is that the 1% lows dropped slightly, but could be deemed as margin of error.

In Death Stranding, the overclock gave us a small 3% boost over the stock performance, again, now putting it as the king of the 7900 XTX cards with a 3 FPS lead over the overclocked performance of the XFX card, also with stronger 1% low figures as well. What this also means is that the Sapphire card is now the fastest GPU we’ve had in this game with the same average FPS as the INNO3D RTX 4090 but with 11% better scores in the 1% lows.

Lastly in Watch Dogs: Legion, we see a small uplift of just under 4%, which is similar to what we’ve seen on other cards, showing that this game just doesn’t utilise overclocked speeds as much as others, though free performance is still nothing to grumble at anyway.