Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX 5500 XT OC 8GB Video Card Review

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Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX 5500 XT OC 8GB Video Card Review

The biggest and the best video card is not always in everyone’s budget, sometimes you have to save a few bucks and make it work but is it worth it?  With that, the most common gaming resolution people play at is 1920×1080 and a card that handles more than that sometimes might be overkill but of course it is not a bad thing.  Today’s review will be on the budget friendly Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5500 XT 8GB OC.

Let’s check out all of the specs and features of this card.

  • Based off of AMD’s 2nd Gen 7nm process RDNA architecture
  • 1540Mhz Base clock
    • Boost Clock of Up to 1845Mhz
    • 1737Mhz Game Clock
    • Robust VRM Cooling
  • 8Gigs of 256Bit GDDR6 RAM
    • 14 Gbps Effective Memory clock speed
  • 1,408 Stream processors
  • Dual UEFI BIOS Support
    • Dual-X cooling Technology
    • Fuse Protection: External Fuse built into the circuit of the external PCI-e connectors
    • Quick Connect Fans
    • Two Ball Bearings
  • Requires 2 slots
    • Dimension: 233 x 121.8 x 39.6 (mm)
  • 1 x HDMI
    • HDMI @ 4096×2160@60Hz
  • 3 x Display Port 1.4 HBR3 w/DSC (lossless encoding)
    • Max of 4 concurrent displays
      • DisplayPort 1.4 5120×2880@60Hz
    • Supported Features
      • TriXX Boost
      • Radeon Boost
      • AMD Compute
      • PCI Express 4.0
      • Streaming up to 8K
      • Asynchronous Compute
      • Radeon Rays Audio and True Audio Next
      • Radeon Image Sharpening
      • Fidelity FX
      • Radeon Freesync 2 HDR
      • Radeon VR Ready Premium
      • Updated TriXX Boost feature to get maximum performance
      • Dual BIOS’
      • Fuse Protection
      • DirectX 12 Optimized
      • HDR Ready
      • Radeon Relive
    • Requires a minimum of 450Watts, recommended 500
    • Requires 1 x 8-Pin PCI Connector

I know the specs are not exciting, but they are important.  Now let’s check out the unboxing.

The first thing we see, is the Sapphire Graphics Card Quick Installation Guide.  Good information, but you won’t need it since I will show you how to install the card in this review.

The weird one, the manufacturers sheet is needed when purchased in Germany.

And then we have the card itself, the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5500 XT 8GB OC.  Now that we have gone over everything, I know, not a ton but we are safe to jump into the next chapter of the review, A Close look at the card.

Continue on to: A Close look at the card

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The Pulse series from Sapphire is the more budget friendly version of the Nitro+, saving you a few dollars by getting rid of the glitter and glam of the Nitro+ series.  By Glitter and Glam, they remove the lighting features, and the larger heatsink so if you are trying to save money and don’t care about the RGB LED’s and the larger heatsink, this is the card for you.  I will get into the heatsink in a bit.

The card measures 9.17 inches in length

It is 4.80 inches in depth.

And 1.55 inches in width, a relatively small card perfect for tighter fits and smaller cases.  The card will only require 2 PCI-e slots, even though it is physically installed on 1 PCI-e slot.

This card provides 3 x Display ports with a specification of 1.4 and 1 x HDMI Port.  The HDMI port provides resolutions up to 4096 x 2160 and the Display port provides resolutions up to 5120 x 2880, you can use all 4 at the same time.

The card comes with no additional adapters, for example a DVI or VGA to HDMI or Display port, so make sure your monitor supports these ports.  If it does not, you can use a DVI to Display or HDMI or a VGA to Display or HDMI adapter.  The fact that the card does not include it, helps the card stay at a better price point, would be pretty worthless to include them if you didn’t need them, right?

Laying the card down, we expose the rear part of the heatsink.  We can see it’s not too large, I wonder what that will mean for thermals… no worries we will find out here.  We can see what looks to be a PCI-E connection, let’s turn the card a little more.

Here we can see the card only has 1 x 8Pin PCIE connection and yes, it needs to be connected.  We can see a little more of the heat sink and we can see the big old “SAPPHIRE” logo, looks nice doesn’t it?  There is another little opening over the Sapphire logo.

The opening is the slot for the BIOS select switch.  This switch switches the card from low powered silent mode off to the left (closest to the IO) and as shown here on the right for Performance mode.  Low Powered Silent mode, reduces the clocks and the voltages on the card keeping the card a little more silent and reducing the heat it generates.  Performance mode, raises the voltages and GPU/Memory speeds for gaming, which of course causes a little more noise and heat to generate.

We will go over all of this in this review.

Here we can see the top of the card, showing off the SAPPHIRE PULSE logo in all of its glory, and the GPU retention mechanism keeping that GPU firmly on that heatsink.  You will also notice there is a metal backplate on this card with a few cut outs throughout the card.  This helps the card exhaust heat into the system which would be sucked out through the rear case fan and depending on your system setup, through the top of the case as well.

 

The rear of the top of the card has a few more cutouts to help push more heat out, through the fins on the heatsink.

The bottom of the card, shows the connectors that would slide into the PCI-e slot, a few stickers with the part number, serial number and then we can also see the heatpipes.

The bottom of the card, we find the Dual ball bearing fans with the Pulse logo’s on them and a few designs along the shroud itself.

Here we find the IO portion of the card.  Here as we mentioned earlier, you will find 3 x Display ports and 1 x HDMI port.  You will also notice the cutouts here exposing the heatsink fins.  This will also help to exhaust some air.

Lastly, we find the card installed into a machine, but how’d it get in there?  No worries my friend, in this next chapter we will go over Installing the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX 5500 XT 8GB OC Card.

Continue on to: Installing the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX 5500 XT 8GB OC Card

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We all at some point didn’t know how to install a video card, and some of still don’t know but this page will help you get that confidence to install it on your own.  Generally, the process is the same with all cards, just a few little differences, but we go over everything here.

In this video, we go over installing the card, but we also go over how to remove your old card without damaging it or your motherboard.

Pretty easy right?  If you noticed, in that video, I don’t only show you how to physically install the card, but I also show you how to remove your older drivers using DDU and then how to locate and install the newer drivers.

For this card, I utilize the latest and greatest drivers which at the time were very buggy for many people.  Using DDU to first uninstall the older drivers first (NVIDIA or AMD), not using the Control Panel or the cringe worthy Device Manager method I have NEVER had issues with drivers.  I hope this helps you so that you never have issues again.

OK, now that the card and drivers are installed, you want to see how it performs right?  Well, on this next page we will go over benchmarks, performance, temperatures and power consumption.  A little later on, we will go over a new portion I am adding to the reviews, so stay tuned.

Continue on to: Benchmarks, Performance, Temperatures and Power consumption

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So that you know what I am working with and to compare performance with your own system, here are my system specifications.

Here are the specs on the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5500 XT 8GB OC.

I used GPU-Z to gather temperatures of the card.  Since the 5 series was released, AMD has added a new temperature sensor, the (Hot Spot) temperature, I will include both readings on my findings now.

The differences, Hotspot is the single max point of temperature on the chip underneath the heat spreader, while GPU temp, also known as Edge temp is the outside of the heat spreader.  Not sure why 2, to me a GPU is a GPU, it should point out and read the single hottest point on the GPU.  Since people are very sensitive about their temps, it might have been done to not freak people out on higher temps but if you are looking for the temps, it’s because you want to know the real temps.

Most if not all programs will show you only the GPU Temperature and will omit the HotSpot. Not sure if this is because it is not relevant or that this sensor is just too new, but I felt I should report it to you.

To measure wattage, I used the Kill A Watt by P3 International, it works great and is very affordable.

Here are the games and programs I use for benchmarking.

  • FutureMark’s 3DMark Fire Strike
  • FutureMark’s TimeSpy
  • Metro Exodus
  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
  • Shadows of the Tomb Raider
  • Far Cry 5
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

Alright, let’s get started.

The overall score on UL’s 3DMark FireStrike 1.1 was 12,432 and the hottest the card reached was 61°C and 74° on the Hotspot.  During this test the card consumed on average 166 Watts and peaked at 253Watts.

This is a budget card, but here we can see the card scored 67% better than all other results.  Let’s see who this handles DX12 on TimeSpy.

TimeSpy roughed it up a little, showing that the Pulse 5500 XT was only 37% better than all other results.  Clearly this card is not meant for 4K gaming but is touted to be a card that takes care of 1920×1080, currently the most popular resolution.  The overall TimeSpy score was 5,147 and heated up the GPU to 63°C and the HotSpot to 81°C while consuming an average of 206Watts, peaking at 290Watts.

I would say though, after watching these for hours, they are boring movies, I would rather play a game.  With that, I want to jump over to the gaming benchmarks.  We will start off with Deep Silver’s Metro Exodus.

For all games in this review, I keep all the settings the same, changing only the resolution.  I raise the settings to Ultra or the highest possible changing only the resolution from 1920×1080 to 2560×1440 and finally to 3840×2160.

Here are the results from all 3 resolutions benchmarked.

At 3840×2160, Metro Exodus is unplayable at the Ultra preset.  The Pulse 5500 XT came in at 18.58 FPS, consuming an average of 252 Watts heating up the card to 81°C.  At 2560×1440, the game still unplayable, came in at 29.83 FPS, taking up 234 Watts on average and keeping the PC toasty at 76°C.  At 1920×1080, you guessed it, still unplayable at 37.31 FPS consuming 246Watts and keeping up the heat at 77°C.

The 5500 XT is meant to be a budget card, Metro being a card kill shows now mercy on it either.  We will get a little more into that later in this review.

So, let’s jump over and see what Laura has for us in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.