Sapphire Radeon RX 6600 XT Pulse Review

A Closer Look

Sapphire hasn’t gone too crazy with the design here, this is a Pulse series card, so the theme is broadly similar to previous Pulse models, such as the Sapphire RX 5500 XT from two years ago. Albeit, they’ve toned down some of the aggressive contouring on the shroud for a more professional look.

The fans look superb though, with some extra trim on the end of the blades to give it a more enclosed design, similar to what we see on the newer MSI and ASUS cards. This design help drive more air downwards, thus improving the cooling performance. I also love the lack of RGB here, just black with a red pin stripe, pretty old-school and rather cool.

Around the back, the black and red persists, with that fantastic looking heart monitor decal and the Pulse logo below it. It really does give it that beating heart of your system vibe. There’s a stunning backplate here too, thick metal, with added ventilation towards the rear, which will greatly improve the cooling potential of the heatsink.

Along the side, you can see a huge heatpipe just above the Sapphire logo. Two more heatpipes terminate around the middle and at the right of the card as they snake through the radiators. It’s a pretty sturdy setup, and dare I say, perhaps overkill for such a modest chipset.

The card runs from a single 8-pin, and AMD recommends around a 500W PSU for a system running this card, which should draw around 160-180W on its own.

On the PCIe side, you can see even more of those beastly heatpipes that are practically crammed in there. If this card runs warmer than its rivals, I’ll be pretty surprised.

Around the back, there’s a bit a good bit of ventilation thanks to the two-slot design of the heatsink. There are three DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC and one HDMI 2.1 with VRR and FRL.

There’s even more ventilation at this end of the card, with some neatly aligned fins that should really help with the heat dissipation, especially when the fans are in a zero RPM state.