Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB Review

This year has seen a lot of graphics card launches, but sadly for consumers, it’s only been from one side of the market; NVIDIA. While this is great for team green, eager consumers and myself have been waiting for some more competition in the market and that has to come of course, from AMD.

While they have shown their hand with the RX 5700 and 5700 XT, it’s not exactly setting the world alight for variety. Sure, you have the choice of going with ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and many more, but apart from the clock speeds and cooling, they are all pretty much the same. What if you want something beefier? What if you don’t need that extra level of performance? There’s a severe lack of choice for consumers from the red team, as not every gamer is the same.

That brings us to the current day and finally we’re starting to get somewhere with the launch of the RX 5500 XT, but before we even delve into what’s going on, we have to look at the background just a little bit.

I know how a consumer thinks on a variety of levels. First and foremost, I am a consumer myself, but for a lot of my adult life, I worked in retail so I’d like to think that I have a slight edge when it comes to their mindset and it all comes down to desire. We all want a Ferrari but we all settle for a Volkswagen Golf, much like in the GPU world, we all want an RTX 2080Ti but we’ll happily settle for an RTX 2060 or RX 5700/5700XT, but what do we really need?

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey pretty much tells us everything we need to know. The most common resolution by a HUGE scale is 1920×1080. Not 4K, not fast-paced 1440p; but 1080p in all its glory. So why not create a card that will compete at 1080p? Enter the RX 5500 XT!

Sapphire RX 5500 XT 4GB

The Sapphire RX 5500 XT is here to compete, but what with? Well to put it into perspective, NVIDIA have recently launched the GTX 1650 SUPER series of cards and for 1080p gaming, they offer fantastic performance for a fantastic pricepoint but can the RX 5500 XT do better?

Features

• Navi 14 GPU
• 7nm Technology
• 1408 Shader Units
• 32 ROPs
• RDNA Architecture
• 1607MHz Base Clock & 1845 MHz Boost Clock
• 4 GB GDDR6
• 1750MHz Memory Clock
• 128-bit bus