A Close look at the card
Contents
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This card is a little wider than most, the fan housing makes it a little wider helping to keep the card cooler than other variants. The card is also a little longer, sporting 3 fans.
The card measures 12 inches in length
and almost 5 inches in width.
About 2.4 inches in depth. With the fan housing, the card will require about 2.5 PCI-e slots even though it only takes 1 physical PCI-e slot, make sure you have some room in your system.
The card includes full sized 2 x Display ports at a 1.4 specification and full sized 2 x HDMI ports. The HDMI ports provide resolutions to up to 4096 x 2160, the Display Ports provide resolutions of up to 5120 x 2880. Since you already know there are no adapters included in the box, make sure your monitor utilizes these ports. There are a ton of adapters you could get if you needed for example a DVI port to HDMI Click here to find it on Amazon, that are very affordable.
Laying the card down on its side exposes the a large heatsink, spanning across the length of the card. The other important piece is that it reveals the 2 x 8PCI-e power connections. Also, along this side, a few RGB elements, some of which we can’t see just yet, but we will soon.
Towards the I/O side of the card, where you plug in your monitors, we find the BIOS Select switch. The card supports dual BIOS but in three position. The default position, one closest to the IO is software controlled via TRIXX and not a BIOS by itself. The middle slot is for quiet operation, which means lower performance and lower voltages and the switch toward the power connectors is for performance which reasonably means it utilizes the cards full potential. Since right now, TRIXX is not 100% operational where you can overclock, the benchmarking and gaming portion of this review are run on the performance setting of the card,… I think everyone will keep it on that side too.
This BIOS switch, is a bit different than other BIOS switches, where you can save your overclocked or modified BIOS’ to, so I wanted to make sure to point that out.
In the center of the card, along the side, we find the SAPPHIRE logo, which hides some treats for us a little later in this review.
Along the rear of the card, we find the end of the heatsink, along with the terminated ends of the heatpipes, but we also find another connector.
Here we find the ARGB header. Unlike I thought originally, this does not allow you to connect an ARGB fan and have it controlled off of the card, this is to allows the card to connect to an ARGB controller on the motherboard so that you can sync the RGB on the card with your other devices using for example Asus Aura, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light, AsRock RGB Sync or what ever other RGB software you may have. That is actually a great idea.
Next to the ARGB header, we find a SAPPHIRE NITRO+ logo.
The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ logo here has a LED backing.
We also find the GPU retention mechanism, helping to hold the heatsink firmly over the GPU.
Here we can see the entire card lit up inside of a system. How’d we get it in there though? In this next page we will go over Installing the Sapphire Radeon Nitro+ RX 5700 XT OC 8GB Card.
Continue on to: Sapphire Radeon Nitro+ RX 5700 XT OC 8GB Card
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I have spent many years in the PC boutique name space as Product Development Engineer for Alienware and later Dell through Alienware’s acquisition and finally Velocity Micro. During these years I spent my time developing new configurations, products and technologies with companies such as AMD, Asus, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA and more. The Arts, Gaming, New & Old technologies drive my interests and passion. Now as my day job, I am an IT Manager but doing reviews on my time and my dime.