Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB Review

A Closer Look

The Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse carries on the design we’ve come to expect from a Pulse card, but has had a few welcomed tweaks in the design department. The 5700 & 5700 XT cards both featured bright red lines across the front, which in all honesty, made it look a bit cheap. This time around, we find a simple black shroud encompassing the large twin dual ball bearing fans which make up the dual-x cooler.

The outer frame of the cooler is pure plastic but it does feel pretty solid and the card as a whole has quite a lot of weight to it. Beneath the fans sits a large aluminium heatsink that spans the length of the card with a triple heatpipe cooling solution.

Branding wise, it’s pretty understated with a simple “Sapphire Pulse” logo in the middle of each of the fans. The fans include 9 black blades with a matte surface and glossy edges to add a little bit of style.

Around the back of the card, we find a large backplate which covers the whole of the PCB minus a few cut outs for connectors, the rear of the GPU core and some stylish air vents. There again, is some slight red accents on the wording which may hinder the theme of your PC but it’s nothing overstated.

The card uses a single 8-pin power connector and can draw enough power up to 225 watts.

The card also features a small BIOS switch where in the distant past we would have expected a CrossFire connector to be.

On the rear IO of the card, we can see that the card takes up two slots in your system and features a lot of cut-outs for ventilation. Along with this, there are three DisplayPort 1.4a ports and a single HDMI 2.0b port.

Clock wise, it’s a difficult one to explain as AMD have scale-able clock speeds. They brand the RX 5500 XT as having a “Game Clock” of up to 1717MHz and a “Boost Clock” of up to 1845MHz while the memory sits at 1750MHz.