Review and testing of the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GD5 video card : Test | Specs | CPU | Config

In this article, we will look at the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GD5 video card, which has an appearance that is not typical for Sapphire products. The fact is that this video card has a combination of black and red in its design, many AMD AIB partners have recently been using this color scheme, while Sapphire Technology previously avoided imitating such a color scheme, reminiscent of the ASUS Republic of Gamers. In addition to the new Sapphire Pulse color scheme, the Radeon RX 560 4GD5 has a slightly overclocked GPU frequency. According to AMD representatives, the Radeon RX 560 video card has a high gaming potential both in e-sports and AAA games. “

Recall that the Radeon RX 560 is a renamed version of the Radeon RX 460 accelerator with all 1024 stream processors active. But there are few such versions of RX 460 on the market, so in relation to most RX 460 cards, the new AMD Radeon RX 560 turns out to be more productive. The graphics card is based on the AMD Polaris 11 (Baffin) graphics chip, which is the fourth generation GCN (GraphicsCore Next) using a 14nm process technology on transistors with a vertically positioned gate (FinFET, fin field effect transistor). As mentioned above, the video card operates with 1024 4th generation GCN stream processors, 64 texture units (TMU), 16 rendering units (ROP) and a 128-bit memory bus, which together with the frequency of GDDR5 chips at 1750 (7000) MHz bandwidth memory subsystems 112 GB / s. The Boost frequency of the graphics core of the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GD5 graphics card has been increased, but not much – from 1275 MHz to 1300 MHz. The video card receives additional power via a 6-pin PCI-E Power cable.

Traditionally, there are no connectors for AMD CrossFireX technology on the top side of the PCB. If such support exists (which is not mentioned in the official materials), then it is implemented exclusively through the PCI Express 3.0 x16 interface. The following rear panel interface connectors are responsible for image output: Dual-Link DVI-D, HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4 (all are single). The dimensions of the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GD5 video card are 210 mm in length, 112 mm in width and 36 mm in height.

A cooler with a small radiator devoid of heat pipes and a fan with a diameter of about 90 mm is responsible for cooling the video card. The pre-installed dual-slot cooler resembles boxed (boxed) COs for Intel desktop processors. The radiator is completely aluminum with a copper heel as a contact surface. The fan impeller diameter is approximately 90 mm. In practice, it turns out that the new Radeon RX 560 is still a budget proposal, which should be enough for comfortable playing in Full HD resolution (in less demanding games or with lowered graphics settings). If we compare AMD Radeon RX 560 with Radeon R7 360, then the new product demonstrates up to 57% higher performance and is suitable for comfortable and smooth operation in most popular games (it copes with “available” games in 1080p resolution). In fact, the Radeon RX 560 is not far from the Radeon RX 460, so the transition from the previous generation to the new one represented by the Radeon RX 560 almost makes no sense.

Specifications

Testing

Power-saving CPU technologies are disabled in all tests. Testing the performance of video cards was carried out in a closed case of the system unit on a system with the following configuration:

Test configuration

• Processor: Intel Pentium G 4560 3500 MHz
• Motherboard: MSI B250M Bazooka
• RAM: 16 GB DDR 4 -2400 MHz
• Data storage: WD Hard Drive 1 TB 5400 RPM
• ОС: Windows 64 bit

The performance of a video card is determined by the number of fps (frames per second) that it can produce in a particular application under certain settings. The performance of the video card in gaming applications is affected by the software installed on the PC, the version of the video driver, as well as the configuration of the computer..

To evaluate the performance in synthetics, we used the 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme tests. Futuremark 3DMark allows you to compare devices ranging from smartphones to high-end PCs. In the Fire Strike settings, you can select the method and quality of texture filtering, the type of full-screen anti-aliasing and the number of multisampling samples, the partitioning factor of primitives for objects to which tessellation is applied, the maximum possible partitioning factor, the resolution and number of samples from shadow maps, the quality of volumetric lighting (sample step in the “ray marching” algorithm when calculating volumetric lighting – an important parameter, large values ​​of which reduce performance), the number of samples per pixel when calculating indirect lighting in the ambient occlusion algorithm, as well as the quality of one of the post-processing types – imitation of the depth of field effect. This parameter adjusts the size of the bokeh texture used in post-processing for objects in the scene, while the Color saturation setting only changes the color saturation of the final image without affecting performance.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike  – 1920×1080 graphics

Game tests

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Graphics settings: (1080p) High -FPS

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Graphics settings: (1080p) Very High -FPS

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Graphics settings: (1080p) Very High -FPS

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Graphics Settings: (1080p) Ultra -FPS