Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX 570 ITX 4GB 11266-06-20G Video Card Review

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Benchmarks, Performance, Temperatures and Power consumption

Contents

Before I get into the performance, let me give you a reference on what my system config is so that you can see how comparable our systems are to see what kind of performance you will see.

Specifications of my system aside, here are the GPU-Z reading of the card itself.

Here is a bit of the same from Sapphires own utility TRIXX.  This utility can help you change the fan speeds, GPU clocks speeds, memory clock speeds and a host of other options.

I will utilize this program a little later in the review to unlock some hidden potential from this card so be sure to continue reading.  You can grab a copy of TRIXX from here: http://www.sapphiretech.com/catapage_tech.asp?cataid=291&lang=eng

This is some more information that TRIXX provides.  You can see this card is based off of AMD’s Ellesmere technology.  This technology can offer up to 2304 stream processors at a 256-bit wife GDDR-5 interface.

During the benchmarking I will be monitoring and of course reporting how much wattage is being consumed and to do that I will be using a “Kill A Watt” by “P3 International”.

I use the following applications to benchmark

OK, let’s get started benchmarking

A score of 10,175 in 3DMark Fire Strike, not bad at all and with that score we can see we are getting 68% better results than all other PC’s.

During this test, the minimum power pulled from my machine was 98.7Watts and the highest was 233Watts.  The most important however was the average, on average the PC pulled 184Watts, that’s is amazingly low.  During this testing, the GPU only heated up to 66°C.

So let’s check out 3DMarks sister benchmark, Time Spy.

So this result is 44% better than all other benchmarked systems.  In this test, the average power consumption was a very low 178Watts and the GPU heated up to 66°C.  All looking good so far and the temps are doing pretty well.  3DMark however is not a game, it is to give you a point of reference of your GPU’s performance to maybe compare with friends or compare to yourself as you tweak and tune your system.  For real world performance, we need to check out some games, so I will start it off with Metro Last Light.

Before we start with the results, here are my settings for Metro Last Light.  I will be testing at 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 3840 x 2160 but aside from the resolutions, these settings will remain the same.

On my previous reviews, I always had SSAA enabled, that destroyed the results and brought no benefits what so ever in the quality of the image, so I have now and will continue to disable it on all reviews. OK, enough talk on to the results.

With all settings set to Very High, this card struggled a bit though surely at Medium it would be able to handle everything just fine.  At its lowest resolution of 1920 x 1080, it only picked up 49.54 frames per second at 66°C with an average power consumption of 228 Watts.  Bumping the resolution up to 2560 x 1440 the performance dropped by 33.14% and with the actually consumed 1 more watt on average, the temps stayed the same.  Trying it out at 3840 x 2160, the performance yet again dropped by a steep 45.26% but honestly it was expected as this card is not really meant to be played at 4K, but lowering the eye candy would help tremendously, this is a mid-tier card.

Metro has always been a video card slayer, its either poor optimization on the games engine or it is just that brutal.  Without SSAA it is still a bit manageable but it seems like at 1920 x 1080 there might be something else we can do to improve performance, it’s so close to the magic 60 frames per second.  We will work on that a little later in the review.  So next up is THIEF.

Here is the configuration I used for THIEF’s benchmark, again only changing resolutions in between tests.

THIEF seems to be a bit better optimized, the results are pretty nice.  At 1920 x 1080, we have a very playable 78.2 frames per second and the power consumption was a very mild 193 on average.  With its performance gains, the temperature of the GPU only went up from Metro’s 66°C.  With a little tweaking, it looks like THIEF at 2560 x 1440 would be playable but it came in at 51.7 frames per second, 33.89% lower than its lower setting at 1920 x 1080.  Power consumption only went up though 1.53 Watts though the temperature did drop 3 degrees.  At 3840 x 2160 things looked a little bleak only pulling 27.3 frames per second, 47.20% lower than its 2560 x 1440 counterpart score.  The temps did raise but by only 1 degree, and the average power consumption did sharply rise 42.35%.

I don’t think we expected 4K UHD to play very well, but at 2560 x 1440 a 51.7 FPS is pretty decent, I would say playable.  So let’s check out Tomb Raider.

Here is the configuration I used for the Tomb Raider benchmark, again only changing resolutions in between tests.

And now on to the results.

Laura kicked it up a bit here and at 1920 x 1080, we can see a whopping 150 frames per second on average heating up only to 66°C and consuming an average of 131 Watts.  Then we step it up to 2560 x 1440 and we can see the frame rate drop down to still a very playable 93 FPS count, the temps only went up 1 degree but here is where things got a little bad.  At 2560 x 1440, we can power consumption jumped 39.91% to 218Watts, not horrible but a pretty big leap.  Performance got pretty bad though at 3840 x 2160, performance dropped considerable at 56.24% to 40.7 frames per second, but I think we can take care of that a bit and we will go over that a little later in the review.

My favorite benchmark, because I love the game is Tom Clancy’s The Division and it’s up next.

And here are my settings

Lots of settings there, but let’s jump into the results.

This one might look a little different than the others because the benchmark shows the percentage of CPU and GPU used as well.

At 1920 x 1080, the Typical GPU score was 60.1, totally playable and the Average Frame Per second is 59.6 which is also very playable, but does not speak well to resolutions above this.  At 1920 x 1080, the maximum temperature was 66°C and the average Wattage consume was 223.

At 2560 x 1440, we can see there was a 28.55% decrease in performance from the Average FPS counter and a 28.29% decrease in Typical FPS though that is to be expected since we did go up.  In 3840 x 2160, we saw a more significant decrease of 46.50% in Average FPS from 42.8 down to 22.9 with a temperature drop of 2°C and only 1 additional watt of power used.

Here at 2560 x 1440 seems that most games start to get at the point where performance starts to suffer a bit, still a bit playable but not 100% at least at the presets we have set here.  At 2560 x 1080 without all the eye candy is where I play most of my games on this card, maybe with High or Medium settings placed.  Talk is cheap though, so let’s get into some game play so you can see what I mean.

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