Sapphire Nitro+ RX 6700 XT Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

Sapphire has gone with a triple fan design as we would hope to see from the Nitro+ range! One of the first things I noticed was the size difference of the fan towards the rear of the card. Notice how it’s a bit bigger? This is going to come in handy as the backplate, which we will look at a bit later has a cutout in it to allow the heat to dissipate better from the heatsink. Sapphire has gone with a silver/black colour scheme which looks like it is starting to catch on as a lot of other cards are coming with similar colour schemes.

Looking at the card from the main side and we can see the RADEON logo and the Sapphire logo that will be lit with RGB LEDs when powered on. We can also see the power connectors which aren’t really at the rear of the card as a whole However, they are on the end of the PCB so there is not much else that can be done as Sapphire has chosen to extend the heatsink past the PCB to allow for better cooling.

Sapphire has gone with an 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector. This is similar to what we have seen on the reference 6700 XT. It’s rather interesting as other partner cards have gone with dual 8-pin power connectors which will aid in them offering more stability and possibly a slightly higher overclock. Either way, Sapphire know what they are doing as their Nitro+ cards are normally at the top of the pile when it comes to AMD GPUs.

Onto the other side of the card and as always, not a whole lot going on. They have kept with the overall design of the card even though we likely won’t be able to see it. Alongside the heatsink, we can see what appear to be some fan and LED wires connected to the PCB.

Onto the back of the card and we can see four heat pipes protruding through the end of the fin array. Most of the other 6700 XT’s we have seen have at least five heat pipes so it will be interesting to see how the Sapphire Nitro+ model keeps up with its thermals.

This is probably the busiest backplate we have seen for a 6700 XT thus far. We have a few logos scattered across the card and even more cutouts. These cutouts are designed more so for letting heat dissipate from the card and heatsink but Sapphire has done it in such a way that they also add an aesthetical appeal to the ordeal. Even looking at the backplate towards the bottom rear and the smaller cutout is where you will plug in your power connectors from your PSU but we can also see that the heatsink actually extends past these. This means that this heatsink and backplate are absolutely massive in comparison to that of the PCB on the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 6700 XT.

Oh yeah, what’s that? One of the cutouts on the backplate reveals the location of a BIOS switch. This is going to allow for an easy switch between BIOS on the card. One of the major benefits is if you want to try and flash the BIOS on the card and anything happens, you can always flip the switch to the other position and still boot the card up. This is sure to come in handy for enthusiasts, overclockers and even those who chose to mine with this card!

We have taken a look at six 6700 XT’s for the launch day and as with all but one, the Sapphire features one HDMI 1.4 connector and three DisplayPort 2.1 connectors.