Although I’m a bit late with my RX 5500 XT series content, I still wanted to check it out, because well, I’m inserted in it and I want to get my hands onto it so I can share my experience with you, and this time the card in question is Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB model.
Just as its 8 GB brother, this model has the same GPU specs, starting from the number of shaders, texture units, ROP’s to the type of memory, although, as I said, this particular model has 4 GB’s instead of 8 GB’s GDDR6 video memory. Sapphire also has an RX 5500 XT Pulse version with 8 GB’s if you want to go for that model.
Speaking of that, be sure to subscribe, because I’m going to do a couple of comparisons with this model, starting off with the GTX 1650 Super, and finishing it off with the 4 GB and 8 GB RX 5500 XT showdowns, it’s coming out soon!
Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB – less is more?
Since this model comes from their well-known Pulse sub-brand, the design cues for it are spread across that series, so this one is very similar to the RX 5700 Pulse which I’ve reviewed a couple of months ago, as well as the RX 5600 XT Pulse and RX 5700 XT Pulse and their reviews, are also coming out soon. Of course, being a lower-tier graphics card performance and GPU wise, the cooling setup is less complex although at first looks like it’s the same on a count of the very similar top plastic shroud, although there is some difference.
For starters, it doesn’t have that red details on the top, which I approve, and everything is more color neutral, especially on the back, where we still have a metal back-plate, unlike with Gigabyte’s model which was plastic, but you won’t get the lit Sapphire logo on the side. Measuring it from the front, where you’ll find three DisplayPorts one HDMI video outputs, the card is actually a bit shorter than its bigger brothers, but still not that far with 233 mm of length. On a count of that, the heatsink is a bit smaller, but it still carries three nickel-plated copper heat pipes, which deserves praise, and overall the cooling seems to be pretty robust considering the TDP of the RX 5500 XT 4GB, for cooling it, video memory and VRM’s without any problem as you’ll see later on. Everything is cooled off with two 90 mm fans which have Sapphire’s own version of fan stop technology bundled in their cool tech feature.
Let over to some of my gameplay footage with this card, before we check out the results, the live performance figures will be shown in the left top corner of this video. You can find my setup which I used here to test out this GPU in the description box down below, and if you have any questions about this particular model, free feel to leave them in the comment section down below and I will try to help you out!
RX 5500 XT 4GB can easily push FullHD resolution
Looking at the benchmarking results, once again, the RX 5500 XT 4GB 1080p gaming is more than doable with high graphics settings, you will get more than decent amount frame-rates, especially if you go for a more optimized title, while 1440p is also doable, although somewhat on the edge because of the 4 GB of video memory. What about 4K you ask? Well… Yeah… As you can see here, I don’t think so…
Although this model comes in factory overclocked, with the boost clock being 1845 MHz, just a bit below that in practice, as you all know, there’s no such thing as too much. With that said, as with Gigabyte’s model, when it comes to overclocking, you can go up to around 2 GHz on the core clock, while the video memory can be completely maxed out at 1860 Mhz, which will, in the end, bring you around 5-7% of additional performance boost, ideal for bumping the frame-rates up a bit at 1080p resolution.
Checking out the temperatures, during idle the card was roaming around the 40°C mark on an open testbed, while under load that was mostly close 70°C for the GPU and memory, while the hot-spot temperature was closer to 80°C. In that case, the noise that the fans were making was basically non-existent as they were spinning between 700 and 800 RPM, which is basically as low as you can get with a graphics cards, at least with what I have seen up until now, and Sapphire had the opportunity to do so since they have a solid cooling solution on a not that power-hungry GPU. Here’s a short sound clip of the fans with the card being under load, while also showing the sound meter for measurement comparison.
RX 5500 XT 4GB series needs a price correction
For powering up this card uses one additional 8-pin PCI-express power connector, which again is not a surprise considering the TDP of it. The whole system pulled around 200W with only the card being under load using the Furmark GPU stress test, so when you subtract the system idle power consumption from that, you will get that it pulls around 150W. The GPUz was reporting around 120W in that case, which is about right considering the power supply efficiency, while during games it will be more in the neighborhood of 80 to 100W.
Sapphire once again did a very good job with this generation of Pulse series found on AMD’s Navi GPU’s, starting with the RX 5700 Pulse model which I, as I mentioned before, tried first, and now this model, but the problem is that the RX 5500 XT series at this moment doesn’t represent that good a value considering with what it’s surrounded by, be it from AMD’s own portfolio or the competitions. Yes, it’s a very capable graphics card series for 1080p gaming, but I’m hoping that a price correction in the near future will be that last step to seal the deal.
That’s it for this time, thanks for checking out my Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB review, and if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
