Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ 16GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

When Sapphire introduced the Nitro+ range, I immediately became a big fan of it as it honestly looks like a card that was thought up in Apple’s offices. It’s clean, it’s big and it just works. I’d even be as bold to say it’s one of the nicest looking cards on the planet and that’s not just in regards to the design, but the build quality as well. It feels solid and that’s reflected in the weight, coming in at 1830 grams it’s fairly big too at 320mm long, 134mm high and 62mm thick meaning that it will take up 3 slots inside your case so definitely check that out first.

In terms of the design, it actually has a severe lack of branding on the front, with just a single logo in the middle of the center fan, but I like that. It keeps things clean and simple and is just enough to break up the smooth gun metal grey shroud and black angled hybrid fan blades.

Beyond the front, the only splash of colour is along the top through the way of a large RGB light bar with again, simple branding. There’s a Sapphire logo down one end, and a Radeon logo down the other, and again it’s hard not to like it. It’s not too in your face but is enough to know which brand of GPU it is.

The full metal backplate seamlessly integrates and moulds into the end of the card and has plenty of perforation as well as a cut out towards the end to help with heat dissipation and is finished in the same gun metal grey colour.

For the I/O, we have two DisplayPort connectors and two HDMI ports and due to its thickness, the rest of the space has been utilised for ventilation for heat to escape out of.

Taking the card apart reveals the large PCB beneath which is almost the length of the cooler. Again, AMD cards seem to utilise a lot of space, and the layout is pretty typical of what we’d expect.

There are two 8-pin power connectors along with an ARGB out connector towards the top right of the card, as well as a BIOS switch at the opposite end.

Power-wise, Sapphire is using 14 phases in total which are split between 8 for the graphics, 2 for the SOC, 2 for memory and another two for other components.

Sapphire has opted for a wave fin heatsink with a v-shaped fin design which is said to reduce turbulence noise as well as force air directly around the GPU to help dissipate heat in the best way possible.

For the VRMs, there are dedicated plates that make direct contact to push heat away into the rest of the finned stack through the five composite heatpipes.

Also for extra rigidity due to the weight, Sapphire have used an alloy frame that helps fix the main structure of the cooler to the PCB without putting undue flex onto the board and this goes from end to end and fixes into the I/O plate.