Sapphire Pulse Radeon 6500 XT 4GB Review

The new AMD Radeon 6500 XT graphics cards are here at last, and that’s great news for those of you waiting to get your hands on a new GPU! While this one isn’t exactly a flagship model, it has the potential to fill the void in the market for low-cost graphics cards. It’s certainly going to be one of the most affordable graphics cards we’ll see this year. However, don’t expect it to innovate in terms of performance, as there’s not a whole lot here that we haven’t seen before. Of course, if they can keep the price and scalpers in check, there should be good numbers of these cards hitting the market, which will appeal to those on a tighter budget, first-time system builders, and just those eager to get their hands on any damn GPU they can so they can play! Furthermore, with just 4GB of VRAM, it’s unlikely this card will appeal to the mining market. It may hurt PC gaming performance a bit too, but if it’s going to help with stock and price in this market, is it a necessary evil? I think it might.

Sapphire Pulse 6500 XT 4GB

It’s a pretty modest but competent graphics card. It’s not a reference design, instead favouring a larger dual fan design. The large fans and robust heatsink are a design we’ve seen on previous Sapphire cards. Personally, I’ve long been a fan of the Pulse series, as they strike a solid balance between price and performance, and it looks like that trend continues with the new 6500 XT. While the 4GB of VRAM may not sound like much, I am expecting decent 1080p and even 1440p performance from this card. It has the horsepower to deliver good performance, but the VRAM could limit you on texture/shadow settings in some more demanding titles. Of course, the benchmarks will reveal all, so stick with us and let’s get this thing going!

Features

• World First 6nm Discrete GPU
• 2.6 GHz (Fastest consumer GPU clock speeds!)
• 16 Compute Units & Ray Accelerators
• 2610 MHz Game Clock
• 16Mb Infinity Cache
• 4GB VRAM @ 18 Gbps
• AMD FidelityFX
• Radeon Anti-Lag
• FreeSync Premium
• Radeon Super Resolution (coming soon)