Sapphire Pulse RX 6600XT: Review | Benchmark | Hashrate| Overclocking

Yes, I am the person who tried to stay on the “plug” to the last (forgive me people sitting on such hardware) in order to finally switch to a video card that will not be the limiter of my system. This chance was unexpectedly presented by my friend, who said that tomorrow there will be a sale in DNS …

We immediately started looking overseas reviews and prices for this card. As it turned out, this piece of silicon bypassed the performance of the RTX 3060, and at the same time it cost from 35k-45k abroad beforehand, which was extremely tempting for gamers.

As a result, the cards were supposed to come out at the same price or lower, but it was not in vain that DNS posted a questionnaire before sales 🙂

I think it’s not worth blaming DNS, because they are the only ones who somehow try to sell at the bottom of the market.

As a result, my friend and I decided that we need to FIGHT for Sapphire Pulse, because it was the cheapest and this company produces the highest quality graphics accelerators for AMD.

To achieve my goal, I made a purchase in more than one pair of hands, because the chance to buy at least one card out of 550 for the whole of Russia is, to put it mildly, not an easy topic.

For these purposes, a friend who reported about the action and his brother helped me. Only in this way 1 out of 3 people was able to buy this philosopher’s stone and it turned out to be not me. I will not describe what happened when I tried to pay, I think everyone understands so 🙂

Let’s move from words to deeds and see what kind of beast I acquired.

Unpacking

We are faced with such a miniature box with a pleasant lightning-fast design and, unlike many others, a bunch of useless “features” and technologies are not written here, but the main characteristics of the video card are simply indicated.

Sapphire has always stood out for its quality and design of video cards, but in some places they have always saved, namely, on the design of the box and packaging.

Inside, a hastily made cardboard box is waiting for us by the little Chinese handles in Uncle Liao’s basement. Here lives a video card wrapped in an antistatic bag and muculature like the personal address of the general director, as well as instructions on how to distort (of course, a video card).

Cooling system and appearance

Sapphire has always loved to stand out with their designs, but that’s usually the case with the Nitro line. Here, the design is simpler, but its style is still preserved. In front we are greeted by a plastic casing with a rather primitive design and two 88mm fans.

If we talk about the backplate, then although it is metallic, it performs more of the function of decoration and does not help in any way in terms of heat dissipation, because air is walking between the board and the plate and there are no thermal pads. They also used a newfangled cooling system with a through-blown air.

The dimensions of the card are: 240 (L) x 119.85 (W) x 44.75 (H) mm. And this quietly allows it to fit into any ATX / mATX case and at the same time it will occupy 2.2 slots.

The radiator is monolithic here and it has two heat pipes with a diameter of 5 mm, which permeate the entire cooling circuit. The heat removal from the GPU is made by indirect contact and is adjacent to the video memory, and the VRM zone also hangs out with them, but a little further away.

The power supply of the video card is not so great and amounts to 170w, so an 8-pin pads will be enough here. But you shouldn’t think about overclocking here, because this card will already lack power, and the cooling system here is rather simple to be honest.

The saddest thing is that Sapphire removed the chip with easy replacement of fans in the cheaper version. Previously, on Pulse 500 and 5000 series video cards from this company, you could simply unscrew one bolt and replace the fan without losing the warranty! Now such an advantage remains only with the Nitro + series, which cost 7,000 rubles more.

They did not come up with anything cardinal in terms of video outputs, here we have 3 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI.

Is this a real problem?

A lot of people reacted sharply to a couple of unpleasant cuts in the new product., namely, reducing the bus to 128 bits and allocating only 8 PCI-E 4.0 lanes. Indeed, it is ridiculous to hear such values ​​in the Middle-end segment, but how, in theory, can this affect?

The bus width can limit the video core for workloads and games in high definition, and 8 lanes can be an unpleasant factor for owners of motherboards or processors that are based on PCI-E 3.0.

When it comes to work tasks, then I think this is not the best option and the best way out of this situation would be to take the RTX3060. As much as I hate to admit it, Nvidia’s decoder has always been better, and no one will argue that Huang’s rays are brighter 🙂

Games in high definition are not forbidden for it, but you need to understand that this card was originally created for 1080p / 1440p. And for this price, in any case, you will not be able to buy a card for games in 4K, even if you carefully monitor Avito.

But in the case of the PCI-E 3.0 interface things are interesting, because not everyone has stones of the 3000/5000 generation Ryzen or the 11th generation from Intel _{(don’t forget about the motherboard yet)}.

I think everyone will be interested to know if the performance differs from the interface generation, so further we will compare them in a couple of games.

Testing

Test bench characteristics:

Processor – Ryzen 7 5800x

Motherboard – Gigabyte B550 Auros Elite

RAM – HyperX Fury RGB 32GB (XMP 3600 CL18-21-21-39 CR1)

Cooling – Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4

PSU – Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB Sync Edition 850W

Корпус – Thermaltake Core P3

SSD Game – Samsung QVO 1TB/Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB

SSD Windows – Samsung EVO 860 250GB

Driver: Adrenalin 21.8.1 Optional SAM enabled on PCI-E 4.0 (direct processor access feature)

Please note! Since I have an open test bench, the temperatures may differ from the closed case!

First of all, let’s drive a bagel and look at the temperatures with revolutions.

Test run at 1080p / 8X MSAA with all settings enabled for 30 minutes.

As a result, we got 72 degrees peak and 85 degrees from the HotSpot sensor at ~ 1250rpm. I think it is quite a good result, because the turntables were not heard and there is a margin for more overclocking of the fans.

Comparative tests PCI-E 4.0 / PCI-E 3.0

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition

Forza Horizon

Unfortunately, at this moment FPS Monitor did not want to work, and Msi Afterburner refused to show 1% and 0.1%, so we will rely on game monitoring. I can see that this game had the most pleasant frame time.

Cyberpunk 2077 (Version 1.3)

How many flattering words were said about optimization and bugs in this game 🙂 At first, the frametime is very pleasant, but after 20-30 minutes small friezes appear in the game and this is a little infuriating (Maybe just lucky). To achieve 50-65 frames per second, you need to shift the reflections by one point and the picture will not be affected.

Control

Metro Exodus

How bad is Ray Tracing?

Control

Metro Exodus Enchanced Edition

Cyberpunk 2077

Perhaps I will not say anything …

What do we have as a result?

Advantages

• Unambiguous top price / performance in games, unless of course RT is taken into account
• Build quality is good, and Sapphire has always been top in this regard
• Quiet enough

Disadvantages:

• As I said before, Huang’s rays are much brighter in games and work.
• Removed easy fan replacement
• Stripped-down PCI-E and shallow bus