Sapphire has always felt like the EVGA of AMD to me. Nobody ever seems to have a lot to complain about when it comes to their gpus, even with one like this where at first you feel like it's shoddily put together, turns out it allows for easier user reparability and maintenance.
I've defaulted to Sapphire Pulse since watching a GN video a while ago. They produced some card with solid thermals and decent overclockability. Might cost more than most of the competition, but it's generally worth it. Haven't regretted my RX 6600 yet.
Yep - I normally buy secondhand GPU's and the only ones that have been problematic have NOT been Sapphire. Dual vBIOS is must for secondhand buyiing confidence though, so shame these don't have it.
I'm happy that Sapphire made this card more on the side of a consumer. Easy to fix minor problems, easy to clean. That's what i like, because that's the only stuff i can do at home without sending it to the repair shop.
One thing about that Shroud that's awesome is You can 3D print your Own, Zero Issues. Since it doesn't depend on clearances Other than Basic 5 screws and some Height clearance. You can make the card Look like you want it to.
Can't put more than one like on this. I do 3d modeling and imagine a cool dragon relief on custom shroud with an MSI mb. Or 3d veronoi cells design (similar to evga but more 3d) in organic theme build or something. So many things you can do for show piece or if you just have the time to make the build that much more personal.
Or just deshroud it completely and swap in 120mm case fans. Boom "Noctua edition" card (**cough cough** the SFX community has been doing this for far longer than Noctua has)
I like Sapphire. This design is what i expect from a Pulse. Simple, good looking and big fans, that will probably not be loud. The decision with the seperating shroud and functional backplate are really practical and show that there are still cards out there that focus on performance and user experience, rather than beeing a minimalistic bar of good looking plastic.
Fuses also make cards much easier to repair. I never had card with fuses that was not repairable after shorted mosfet. Die always survive and you don't have burned through PCB. I like to see that on lower end card, too many more expensive boards skip them for some reason.
Yeah, cards with fuses are the best. If you're confident, you can remove the fuse and add a fuse holder socket (i advocate for the SMD ceramic ones) and that makes things even easier. ALSO, the ceramic fuse holder surrounds the fuse on all sides facing the board, thus risk of any kind of damage from any action from the fuse is zero. It's rare, but i have seen it happen. That said, these days PSUs have their own internal fuses to prevent that, but never hurts to be overprotected.
The reason for the fan shroud moving is because the holes in the PCB are larger than the screws. The screws are held by spring tension and this is what gives it play. If they were just screws and made full connection with the shroud and back plate you wouldn't get that movement.
I guess Steve is not too familiar with the sound dampening concept of the floating suspension. I have a feeling they took inexpensive loud fans and designed the shroud to absorb most of the sound causing harmonics. In a vary cost effective way with flexible plastic and spring loaded fasteners.
That's pretty cool, I never thought of it like that. Although even with floating suspension, you do still want the screws to be tightened so they can't fall out.
Once again Sapphire proves they know how to make an affordable user-friendly card. I don't care about the percieved build quality of a card in my hands., im rarely holding it. I want it to be easy to service, easy to clean, and cheap. I would rather a cheap, easy to remove, unadorned shield and the design focus put into performance, cooling, and budget. I'm glad sapphire is doing that. I wish they would take it one step further and just use standard 92x15mm fans, i'd love that. Every card i've ever bought has had the fans fail and i've had to DIY a cooling solution. That would make it so much easier.
Wow, like you mentioned I haven't seen a GPU shroud that comes off that easily since the old Radeon HD 7000 series and the R9 series GPUs. My old Powercolor PCS 7970 and Sapphire R9 280x toxic all came apart just like this pulse model, made it so easy to replace fans and to clean out dust etc... Awesome to see again!
My last 3 GPUs have all been Sapphire and Powercolor cards, Sapphire RX580 (Still bangs for 1080p) 8gb, Powercolor Red Dragon RX580 (moved to a gaming build for the grandkids for 1080p), and currently socketed Sapphire Pulse RX 6700 (Non-XT) that is UV / OC and rips at 1440p for gaming. All 3 cards have been rock solid performers, less expensive than most competitors, and a breeze for maintenance. Building rigs for 20 years, I'll be the first to endorse a Sapphire card. They truly are the eVGA of AMD. Never had to RMA a Sapphire card, but I've repaired dozens of them and by all accounts, I've heard nothing but excellent reviews about their support / RMA processes. Keep up the great work with these teardowns Steve. These are the types of videos that consumers absolutely need to make educated purchasing decisions. Thank you!
That having the shroud and fan separate from the heatsink, and the flexibility of the mounting of the shroud, is a SMART move. I really like that part of this design. Oh, and that empty controller and two headers Steve comments on are probably for the Nitro+ version of the card, which they like to add an RGB controller and external header. I have an RX 6600XT Nitro+ card, and it has both of those while the Pulse version does not, and costs a little less.
I will be the first to say that as long as a product works well and performs well i couldnt give a damn if it feels cheap. No amount of sleek brushed metal or fancy design choices can fix design issues. How it actually performs is whats important. I would take a plastic shroud with easy access fans like this one on a $1600 card over one with "screwless" brushed metal design any day as long as the cooling and game performance were adequate.
So you'd buy a card based purely on whether the fans were easily serviceable ? Easily pleased then. I would be pissed if a card even that cheap had its fans go on me. I've got a collection of Ati cards, and others, that are well over a decade old and whilst their performance is shit nowadays at least the fans still work. In 30 years of PC gaming I've never had a fan go on me.
You all deserve a medal, getting a 4060ti teardown done as well as the review and doing all of the 7600 reviews and breakdowns, right before having to travel to computex
As someone who bought an EVGA card back in the 900 series (good times), I've found that Sapphire has seemingly filled a similar role that EVGA did with Nvidia back in the day. Quality product yet simple to work with, especially my Pulse 6700XT. As for the play in your unit, I'd be disappointed if I bought a card and received that, but like you said, lord knows what happened behind the scenes because of how absolutely insane this launch has been for AMD.
the play comes from the fact that the shroud is mounted under spring tension, instead having screws that direct mount to the pcb would remove most of the play
And honestly I'd rather have it this way; it looks very user replaceable. Personally after the several years of the GPU shortage and now these non-meaningful generational improvements in the midrange segment, I'm pretty jaded. It would be fair to say I'm looking for anything to complain about, and the reality is it's a $300 card. Just wish the GPU core itself was more performant.
It's not that bad of a card for the price. Still, there are more demands in the VRAM department. Honestly, I'd rather put in a few more dollars and get a 6700 (non-XT). I use a 6800XT since the price fell so much and it seemed like a good future proofing solution considering the rest of the components that I use. The Nitro+ runs so cool compared to the Tuf. Overall, Sapphire's changes in the shroud and fins needs more credit. Looks a lot easier to switch things out and service the card in a more expedient manner. The amount of screws is actually quite small compared to some other SKUs I've seen.
I'm absolutely confident that the removable shroud is a quality of life feature. Ask Sapphire and they'll confirm. They do this on all their cards. If there's one thing true about them, it's that their RMA/serviceability is top notch.
8:27 This design is a BIG advantage! It must be a compensation for the absence of 'quick connect' fan they usually had on their products. Very thoughtful, good job Sapphire!
sigh just 5 years ago this was a $100 card (RX 560). While the plastic shroud mounted directly to the PCB with plastic towers feels cheap - honestly, I'd take it because that 4 screws to dusting maintenance and just 8 screws to change compound design is leaps and bounds better than the puzzles Nvidia cards have become.
@@jameshernandez4112 hmm. 128-bit memory bus, budget memory capacity - sure - it's a 258-bit card with mid and high end memory configurations.... It's a modern RX 560 with ray tracing capability. It's even right there in the pricing. If you factor in the additional silicon of around 65% that's around $164. Then factor in the 50% inflation since then and you're right around $249 so this card is only $20 more than that.
The RX 560 couldn't compete with even the 1050 back in the day while the 580 was a 1060 competitor. Based on that, I also believe that this is more of a 580 successor that will compete against the 4060.
@@cracklingice ... The 560 was a 75watt card that came with 4 gigs of ram and was worse than then 1050ti. This is a 3060 competitor. Which means it's on the same level as the 580.
I have a sapphire rx 590. I had a fan that started grinding in a month of ownership. I contacted support, they asked me to send a video. I did. They got back to me in a few hours asking for a shipping address they can send the replacement to. I did not need to send proof of purchase or anything. Those were one of those one screw quick swap fans. They asked me to send back the deffective fan for failure analyze, if I can. Was a nice experience other than it happened in the first place. Over all I am satisfied with the brand. It's been years and the card still serves me well. Sapphire is good in my books.
This is a really nice design. Simple, but in this case that's really valuable (nothing about this card needs to be complicated). Also, those fuses are REALLY good to see, because they're a sign that Sapphire cares about repairing boards. Like you said, fuses don't prevent failures, but they DO prevent charring expensive ICs, PCB traces, etc when something goes wrong. They're an insurance policy, often omitted to save a few pennies, but their presence means that Sapphire cares about recovering the board if it happens to suffer a fluke power rail excursion (replace the component that failed, replace the fuse, no cooked PCBs, good to go). I'm really happy to see this.
Honestly, something like the Acer Predator Bifrost A770 makes a lot of sense to me - horizontal fins over the GPU and a fan blowing hot air out the back, and vertical fins on the front half of the card, possibly with a blow-through configuration there. Sure, Acer flubbed the Bifrost, but the base concept seems sound - possibly minus the blower fan, regular fans seem to work perfectly well with horizontal fins, after all.
The Vega 56 Pulse also had a flow through cooler design, simply because they used the "nano" version of the Vega PCB for it. Essentially half of the card's length was just the cooler, similar as you'd find on some modern nvidia cards these days.
The Vega 56 Pulse also had a similar easily removable shroud design (as well as contact-pad fans). Somehow something ended up damaged on my shroud where one fan would not spin, long after warranty was gone, even after replacing the fans. In the end I removed the shroud, not disturbing the metal portion of the heatsink, and zip-tied a couple of case fans on, using an adapter to run them off of the cards PWM signal.
have to admit though, horizontal fins are rare and as someone sometimes looking to adapt a 1 or 2 slot Graphics card into a Rack server case it makes the world of difference for that but this particular model looks like its a bit to big to the sides to fit into a 1U rackmount if i look at the bracket.
that shroud design is good for someone that want to make diy shroud for noctua fans or any custom stuff, easy with 3d printer few standoffs, plate with mounting holes and you can have whatever you want :)
I bought a renewed Saphire RX 6600 a week ago (very similar looking design) and went trough the same experience with the play in the frame. I tried tightening the screws as well and it didn't work. But the card itself worked perfectly with decent temps and it was a gift for someone else, so I didn't mess with it too much. I would buy again.
Another advantage of being able to remove the shroud without removing the heatsink is that if a fan stops working you can easily replace the stock fans with two case fans which can improve cooling performance assuming that you aren't using very low quality fans.
vibration transfer that is why the shroud is spring loaded, to minimise that from the fans spinning. You call it cheap I call that good engineering, rather a card that feels cheap to handle than a card that is more likely to break over time from use. Surprised you missed that, seems obvious to me. why add complexity to the design otherwise? as it's just more cost to make the shroud spring loaded. EDIT: regarding your closing remarks, think about it the shroud is screwed in directly to the pcb itself instead of the heatsink, that is why they spring loaded. It's not cheap and sapphire are actually the best AMD board partner, they have always produced the best performing designs and they actually have solid history of quality and innovation with their cards. Sapphire in the past was the lie support AMD/ATI needed to stay alive but oh how people forget who buttered their bread for them.
I recently cleaned and reposted my 5600XT Sapphire Pulse and the construction is nearly identical. Very easy to maintain, good to see they have not gotten away from this.
As usual, great video. My last card (RX 570 Nitro+ 8GB version) and my current one (RX 6700 XT Pulse 12GB) are both from Sapphire. Great cards and good quality, I highly recommend them.
The card for my first self built PC was a Sapphire HD 4850. Was happy with it. When I upgraded I went for an HD 7850 and went with Sapphire again. That card was a legend, really good. Still works too. For my second self built I went over to team green. Reviews made it seem the GTX 970 was a fantastic card.....I found the performance pretty disappointing. It was an ASUS Stryx. I sold it and got a second hand GTX 980 ti also by ASUS. That card unfortunately died suddenly for no discernible reason. I was playing Sunset Overdrive, my screen went black and it just....freaking died. I had used it for about a year or two and the previous owner had it for a year. The market wasn't that great at the time but I went with the RTX 2060 by Gigabyte. Around the performance of my previous card, I went with RTX cause I didn't mind paying for the new tech. In hindsight it was a good choice, DLSS 2 definitely helped push out extra performance. The card is a loud piece of crap but it did pretty well. Originally I wanted to go for a 3070 or even 3080. But then the dark times happened. I opted to go for a monitor upgrade instead (1440p ultrawide baby). Looking back at it I feel I dodged a bullet, looking at the lacking RAM on those models. Plus I really hate how Nvidia conducted itself. I really like stuff like DLSS but they simply don't deserve my money. Since I was going back to AMD going with Sapphire was the obvious choice, pretty much the number 1 in AMD cards as far as I am concerned. My RX 7900 XT Pulse is really quiet. It's not like sitting next to a freaking blow-dryer anymore. Though I have to say, it's a good thing the card went down by about 400 bucks or else I wouldn't have gotten it either. I gotta say I like AMD's software a lot better over the Gforce Experience (stop making me log in for driver updates Nvidia....ffs). And I don't know what it is, some people call me crazy but....I SWEAR the colours look better on AMD cards for some reason.
Both my 6800xt and my 7900xtx are sapphire cards that I got after being impressed by the engineering of their cards in previous teardown GN has done. I don't have anything to compare them against, but so far I'm happy with them.
I bought my Sapphire Pulse RX6800 (non-XT) because of the quality Steve found in Sapphire cards in his reviews and tear downs. It has been a good experience.
The thing I love most about Sapphire's cards is the attention to detail. I don't mean fit-&-finish. I mean having sufficient openings for air to vent. I mean having sufficient VRMs. I mean the simplicity of their designs.
The looseness is vibration dampening on the outer fan shroud. There's literally no reason whatsoever to have springs there if not for that reason. I forget model, but one of my old Nvidia cards had this as well. I know, because the first time i took it apart, a couple of springs got lost, re installation resulted in a noisier card.
Thanks for doing a teardown of a partner card, I would love to see them more consistantly because it is hard now to know how serviceable is what you are buying since you stopped doing these kind of videos.
Love the design of this card. I've been thinking about getting a new eGPU for my Laptop and having AV1 encode might be very useful as eGPUs can currently only be connected via 4x pcie. Might pick this one up once the price has come down a bit.
Great review. I'd buy this 7600 over the others because of serviceability features for the shroud and fan - it's the small things that matter between the various 7600s. My use case for the 7600 would be for light gaming and AV1 encode/decode. I don't know if AMD's AV1 encode/decode on 7xxx series is any good or not (more research required). Would love to see GN do series on 264/265/AV1/VP9 GPU encoding/decoding
The way they design this card is awesome. Sure the looseness might feel cheap but giving the trade off is how easy it is to work on, I'll take that plus once its in the system and it don't make any noise or rattle, the movement wouldn't matter.
The advantage of a removable shroud (and keeping the heatsink on the card) is the ability to fit your own fans of choice for quieter cooling. De-shrouding, in other words. But ideally the heatsink needs to be flat with no protruding obstacles that would prevent fan mounting, and it looks like this one would work fine.
Is the shroud vibration damped at all? having it slightly loose would be a good thing for noise if it's set up properly. I currently have a sapphire 7900 in my box & even pulling 400W keeping it's tj in the 70Cs, I can't hear it over the near-idling fans on the CPU cooler, it's crazy how well engineered the cooling is.
Reminds me of my oldie Asus GTX970 Strix ... build similar way 😉And yeah replaced/modded the fans with black 90mm Noctuas. Card still running in my nephews PC to this day.
I have the Sapphire Pulse RX 6800 and the cooler is pretty similar. Makes me curious if that play in the shroud is present on mine as well. I don't recall there being an anchor screw on the backplate. Either way, it performs really well so I may not even bother until servicing is necessary.
@SheranAslam max thermals I see in my system(Corsair 4000D) is 58C and about 70 on hot spot. It never really goes above that. It'll vary based on the game(RT, etc) from 50-58 with a high flow case. Max fan speed that I allow is 50%. Idle temps are low 30s... power draw can vary from game to game but I see anywhere between 180 to a little over 200 depending on RT etc. OC is set to 2450MHz on the core and VRAM is at 2150MHz
Sapphire did pretty well this time. Sapphire RX 6600 pulse had only 1 heatpipe. Only 1! RX 7600 has 2. That's an improvement. and as Steve said Shroud design got better. I am glad Sapphire did their homework this time. Should I buy RX7600, I guess Pulse model is going to be my first choice.
The card tears down pretty much the same as the RX 6600 Pulse. A few differences, like dual heat pipes vs a single long one, a finer fin stack on the 6600, the bar for the VRM pads. The shroud is attached the same. The fans are attached the same. Same fans. Same back plate for the most part, though the 6600 is a smaller card with out the heatsink over hang. The numbers on the 6600 are good over all with low to no noise, temps that never get too hot and the single 8 pin so power draw is exactly what is expected. FPS is pretty much good for all out at 1080p and this card is aimed at that market, but can apparently perform well at slightly reduced settings for 1440p. I don't have a 1440p monitor so IDK.
7:55 I think my Gigabyte 1660Ti disassembles in a similar manner, I replaced the thermal paste on it just a couple of weeks ago and I think I could seperate the fan shroud including the fans from the cooler with unscrewing the heatsink.
It seems to fit the ARGB header pinout, so the assumption that this could be used to easily feed in RGB to sync the card's "bling" to the rest of the system seems reasonable (and actually much simpler and more compatible than adding a separate RGB controller to the card; everyone who wants to use RGB will have their preferred controller in the system anyways).
Steve, have you ever heard of "reworking"? When a manufacturer uses low-quality parts (GigaByte PSUs) or low-quality assembly processes, there is a high percentage of defective parts. To try and keep profits sky-high, they will attempt to "repair" these faulty assemblies. A "factory fresh" part may have been "repaired" two or three times before being shipped. Edward Demming showed that it is cheaper to use quality parts and superior assembly processes. But only the Japanese listen to him.
I've had multiple Sapphire cards. They've all been very high quality. Personally, the fan shroud being like that wouldn't bother me. Unless it rattled. My next AMD card will be Sapphire as well.
that cooler design i think is brilliant at this price point, is straight to the point and really painless to set just some noctua fans in if you want or even use that cooler in another gpu as a spare if the worst comes to that gpu, i think is quite awesome design allowing for really long service life
I have the Sapphire Pulse RX 6700 and it feels of high quality. When I finally got the card, I reviewed the video that was done on here for it as one of the determining factors for me buying it. The backplate looks like it might potentially be the same one that Sapphire used on the 6700.
I wonder if a respin of the shroud molds with slightly thicker spacers would help the looseness. Just enough to add more stiffness. Given the cost of making molds and the low price-point of this card it's almost certainly not worth doing for this product. But for a future product design that might be all that's needed.
8:15 i have a palit dual oc gtx 1080, it is exactly same build as this card. It was built in 2018 march, fan died last year. It was rather easy to change it like 5-10 minutes. The fan was branded as firstd
The shroud thingy is way more worse on my card, it's all wobbly, sagging, shaking, you name it. But since i put it in the case and never look it again, like i did that i bought skylake machine and never ever touched anything apart from an m2 ssd and gpu. So it is not a problem if you don't open your case every time and touch it as a pervert...
the RX 7700 and 7800 will restore balance and happiness in the gaming community. Forget everything that is currently being released and be patient for those cards, trust me
actually you dont have to take the whole shroud off to replace or clean a fan. they are secured with a tiny screw, that you can reach from the top between the blades and just take the fan out this way. most comfortable way to replace a dead fan that i have seen so far :)
my 5700xt pulse had the same issue Its that the screws on the shroud are spring loaded and the shroud is supposed to "free float" and thus reduce resonance vibrations from the dual axial fans causing interference
10:15 i have 5600XT, it launched at $270 and it had dual bios. Kinda sad that didnt keep that option but most of us are going to run it at performance mode anyways.
I just bought this card at 220 dlls here in Mexico during a sale, I upgraded from a first Gen 2060. The sagging shroud is also present in my card, but it seems a bit firm at the far end of the card. I am thinking about asking a friend to 3d print me another shroud so I can accommodate a couple Noctuas, to see if it makes a difference.
Sapphire has always felt like the EVGA of AMD to me. Nobody ever seems to have a lot to complain about when it comes to their gpus, even with one like this where at first you feel like it's shoddily put together, turns out it allows for easier user reparability and maintenance.
Their design is also really simple but beautiful I love my sapphire pulse
I've defaulted to Sapphire Pulse since watching a GN video a while ago. They produced some card with solid thermals and decent overclockability. Might cost more than most of the competition, but it's generally worth it. Haven't regretted my RX 6600 yet.
@@trajectoryunown same for me with my sapphire nitro+ 6700 xt :D
Yep - I normally buy secondhand GPU's and the only ones that have been problematic have NOT been Sapphire. Dual vBIOS is must for secondhand buyiing confidence though, so shame these don't have it.
Same here, picked up a used Sapphire Nitro 6700xt specifically because of the robust VRAM cooling.👍
I'm happy that Sapphire made this card more on the side of a consumer. Easy to fix minor problems, easy to clean. That's what i like, because that's the only stuff i can do at home without sending it to the repair shop.
And the screws are simple phillips screws, compared to nvidia's torx screws. That's also a big plus to me.
@@kniazjarema8587 heh. I see what you did there
Pretty sure most 2 fan cards are designed like this
Sapphire never failed to impress. It's no surprise they were the goto people brought up when EVGA left the game.
I'm surprised they don't come with a mesh to hold dust, why depend on the case to have it?
One thing about that Shroud that's awesome is
You can 3D print your Own, Zero Issues.
Since it doesn't depend on clearances Other than Basic 5 screws and some Height clearance.
You can make the card Look like you want it to.
Can't put more than one like on this. I do 3d modeling and imagine a cool dragon relief on custom shroud with an MSI mb. Or 3d veronoi cells design (similar to evga but more 3d) in organic theme build or something. So many things you can do for show piece or if you just have the time to make the build that much more personal.
Dont forget passive cooling if the case and airflow allows it.
Or make a shroud to fit bigger/better fans (Noctua mod anyone?)...
@@stephanweinberger Noctua fans perfect for steampunk exposed copper and metal build.
Or just deshroud it completely and swap in 120mm case fans. Boom "Noctua edition" card (**cough cough** the SFX community has been doing this for far longer than Noctua has)
I like Sapphire. This design is what i expect from a Pulse. Simple, good looking and big fans, that will probably not be loud. The decision with the seperating shroud and functional backplate are really practical and show that there are still cards out there that focus on performance and user experience, rather than beeing a minimalistic bar of good looking plastic.
yes really, i tried their RX 6950XT Toxic Liquid cooled and it was a beast and temp max 45
Easy to remove dust from this card, going by how easily the shroud is dismantled.
Yep, fans too.
Also seems to have a passive cooling option for tight space applications with adequate case air flow. SFC ITX anyone?
@@TheArchaos I would LOVE to see someone come up with 3D printed shrouds that you can fit various other fans into.
@@RandomlnternetGuy In niches there is riches.
@@RandomlnternetGuy If you design it, they will come.
Fuses also make cards much easier to repair. I never had card with fuses that was not repairable after shorted mosfet. Die always survive and you don't have burned through PCB. I like to see that on lower end card, too many more expensive boards skip them for some reason.
Yeah, cards with fuses are the best. If you're confident, you can remove the fuse and add a fuse holder socket (i advocate for the SMD ceramic ones) and that makes things even easier. ALSO, the ceramic fuse holder surrounds the fuse on all sides facing the board, thus risk of any kind of damage from any action from the fuse is zero. It's rare, but i have seen it happen.
That said, these days PSUs have their own internal fuses to prevent that, but never hurts to be overprotected.
The reason for the fan shroud moving is because the holes in the PCB are larger than the screws. The screws are held by spring tension and this is what gives it play. If they were just screws and made full connection with the shroud and back plate you wouldn't get that movement.
thanks!!! i though the screws were not tight enough haha....
I guess Steve is not too familiar with the sound dampening concept of the floating suspension. I have a feeling they took inexpensive loud fans and designed the shroud to absorb most of the sound causing harmonics. In a vary cost effective way with flexible plastic and spring loaded fasteners.
thats exactly right I tightened mine down and the card would houl and whistle so i loosened them back up again and things were fine
This ^
That's pretty cool, I never thought of it like that. Although even with floating suspension, you do still want the screws to be tightened so they can't fall out.
As a DIY lover I really love that shroud design. I hope it becomes a trend since the right to repair movement has becomenso prevalent.
Once again Sapphire proves they know how to make an affordable user-friendly card. I don't care about the percieved build quality of a card in my hands., im rarely holding it. I want it to be easy to service, easy to clean, and cheap. I would rather a cheap, easy to remove, unadorned shield and the design focus put into performance, cooling, and budget. I'm glad sapphire is doing that. I wish they would take it one step further and just use standard 92x15mm fans, i'd love that. Every card i've ever bought has had the fans fail and i've had to DIY a cooling solution. That would make it so much easier.
Wow, like you mentioned I haven't seen a GPU shroud that comes off that easily since the old Radeon HD 7000 series and the R9 series GPUs. My old Powercolor PCS 7970 and Sapphire R9 280x toxic all came apart just like this pulse model, made it so easy to replace fans and to clean out dust etc... Awesome to see again!
My Sapphire RX570 ITX is like this too. Also my old HD7750 and HD7770.
It'd be nice to see more cards adopt that easy shroud removal for cleaning/fan replacement.
My last 3 GPUs have all been Sapphire and Powercolor cards, Sapphire RX580 (Still bangs for 1080p) 8gb, Powercolor Red Dragon RX580 (moved to a gaming build for the grandkids for 1080p), and currently socketed Sapphire Pulse RX 6700 (Non-XT) that is UV / OC and rips at 1440p for gaming. All 3 cards have been rock solid performers, less expensive than most competitors, and a breeze for maintenance. Building rigs for 20 years, I'll be the first to endorse a Sapphire card. They truly are the eVGA of AMD. Never had to RMA a Sapphire card, but I've repaired dozens of them and by all accounts, I've heard nothing but excellent reviews about their support / RMA processes. Keep up the great work with these teardowns Steve. These are the types of videos that consumers absolutely need to make educated purchasing decisions. Thank you!
That having the shroud and fan separate from the heatsink, and the flexibility of the mounting of the shroud, is a SMART move. I really like that part of this design.
Oh, and that empty controller and two headers Steve comments on are probably for the Nitro+ version of the card, which they like to add an RGB controller and external header. I have an RX 6600XT Nitro+ card, and it has both of those while the Pulse version does not, and costs a little less.
I will be the first to say that as long as a product works well and performs well i couldnt give a damn if it feels cheap. No amount of sleek brushed metal or fancy design choices can fix design issues. How it actually performs is whats important. I would take a plastic shroud with easy access fans like this one on a $1600 card over one with "screwless" brushed metal design any day as long as the cooling and game performance were adequate.
So you'd buy a card based purely on whether the fans were easily serviceable ? Easily pleased then. I would be pissed if a card even that cheap had its fans go on me. I've got a collection of Ati cards, and others, that are well over a decade old and whilst their performance is shit nowadays at least the fans still work. In 30 years of PC gaming I've never had a fan go on me.
You all deserve a medal, getting a 4060ti teardown done as well as the review and doing all of the 7600 reviews and breakdowns, right before having to travel to computex
As someone who bought an EVGA card back in the 900 series (good times), I've found that Sapphire has seemingly filled a similar role that EVGA did with Nvidia back in the day. Quality product yet simple to work with, especially my Pulse 6700XT. As for the play in your unit, I'd be disappointed if I bought a card and received that, but like you said, lord knows what happened behind the scenes because of how absolutely insane this launch has been for AMD.
the play comes from the fact that the shroud is mounted under spring tension, instead having screws that direct mount to the pcb would remove most of the play
@@moorhen6156 What kind of benefit might the spring tension provide instead of using (normal) screws?
And honestly I'd rather have it this way; it looks very user replaceable. Personally after the several years of the GPU shortage and now these non-meaningful generational improvements in the midrange segment, I'm pretty jaded. It would be fair to say I'm looking for anything to complain about, and the reality is it's a $300 card. Just wish the GPU core itself was more performant.
@@glorfindel4945 I'd imagine that since the fans are mounted to the shroud, the shrouds on spring tension reduce fan noise. Just a guess though.
@@glorfindel4945 might be quieter, fan Operation.
It's not that bad of a card for the price. Still, there are more demands in the VRAM department. Honestly, I'd rather put in a few more dollars and get a 6700 (non-XT). I use a 6800XT since the price fell so much and it seemed like a good future proofing solution considering the rest of the components that I use. The Nitro+ runs so cool compared to the Tuf.
Overall, Sapphire's changes in the shroud and fins needs more credit. Looks a lot easier to switch things out and service the card in a more expedient manner. The amount of screws is actually quite small compared to some other SKUs I've seen.
I'm absolutely confident that the removable shroud is a quality of life feature. Ask Sapphire and they'll confirm. They do this on all their cards.
If there's one thing true about them, it's that their RMA/serviceability is top notch.
8:27 This design is a BIG advantage! It must be a compensation for the absence of 'quick connect' fan they usually had on their products. Very thoughtful, good job Sapphire!
sigh
just 5 years ago this was a $100 card (RX 560). While the plastic shroud mounted directly to the PCB with plastic towers feels cheap - honestly, I'd take it because that 4 screws to dusting maintenance and just 8 screws to change compound design is leaps and bounds better than the puzzles Nvidia cards have become.
This is much more in the line of the 480/580. Which launched around 230 I think.
@@jameshernandez4112 hmm. 128-bit memory bus, budget memory capacity - sure - it's a 258-bit card with mid and high end memory configurations....
It's a modern RX 560 with ray tracing capability. It's even right there in the pricing. If you factor in the additional silicon of around 65% that's around $164. Then factor in the 50% inflation since then and you're right around $249 so this card is only $20 more than that.
The RX 560 couldn't compete with even the 1050 back in the day while the 580 was a 1060 competitor. Based on that, I also believe that this is more of a 580 successor that will compete against the 4060.
@@cracklingice ... The 560 was a 75watt card that came with 4 gigs of ram and was worse than then 1050ti. This is a 3060 competitor. Which means it's on the same level as the 580.
@@narutogett Except the '4060' is actually a 4050...
I have a sapphire rx 590. I had a fan that started grinding in a month of ownership. I contacted support, they asked me to send a video. I did. They got back to me in a few hours asking for a shipping address they can send the replacement to. I did not need to send proof of purchase or anything. Those were one of those one screw quick swap fans. They asked me to send back the deffective fan for failure analyze, if I can. Was a nice experience other than it happened in the first place. Over all I am satisfied with the brand. It's been years and the card still serves me well. Sapphire is good in my books.
Just got my GN coasters in today, happy to support what you guys do!
Nice little card. I'll be sure to grab one when it's less than $230 👍
This is a really nice design. Simple, but in this case that's really valuable (nothing about this card needs to be complicated). Also, those fuses are REALLY good to see, because they're a sign that Sapphire cares about repairing boards. Like you said, fuses don't prevent failures, but they DO prevent charring expensive ICs, PCB traces, etc when something goes wrong. They're an insurance policy, often omitted to save a few pennies, but their presence means that Sapphire cares about recovering the board if it happens to suffer a fluke power rail excursion (replace the component that failed, replace the fuse, no cooked PCBs, good to go). I'm really happy to see this.
So few cards have horizontal fins. I don't know why you'd want to blow hot exhaust into your motherboard, or these days your M.2 drive.
Honestly, something like the Acer Predator Bifrost A770 makes a lot of sense to me - horizontal fins over the GPU and a fan blowing hot air out the back, and vertical fins on the front half of the card, possibly with a blow-through configuration there. Sure, Acer flubbed the Bifrost, but the base concept seems sound - possibly minus the blower fan, regular fans seem to work perfectly well with horizontal fins, after all.
What you miss to understand, that shroud play is a good thing because it dials down the vibration from the fans.
The Vega 56 Pulse also had a flow through cooler design, simply because they used the "nano" version of the Vega PCB for it. Essentially half of the card's length was just the cooler, similar as you'd find on some modern nvidia cards these days.
The Vega 56 Pulse also had a similar easily removable shroud design (as well as contact-pad fans). Somehow something ended up damaged on my shroud where one fan would not spin, long after warranty was gone, even after replacing the fans. In the end I removed the shroud, not disturbing the metal portion of the heatsink, and zip-tied a couple of case fans on, using an adapter to run them off of the cards PWM signal.
Personally I bought RX 6700 10 GB - it's also Sapphire Pulse. It seems very similar, but feels a bit less cheap.
have to admit though, horizontal fins are rare and as someone sometimes looking to adapt a 1 or 2 slot Graphics card into a Rack server case it makes the world of difference for that but this particular model looks like its a bit to big to the sides to fit into a 1U rackmount if i look at the bracket.
The Sapphire and pulse cards seem to have always been just solid more budget-like AIB cards.
the design for having the heatsink seperate from the shroud actually makes me consider the sapphire model so far, thanks for the teardowns, gn
This cooler is reminiscent of the rx580 where the shroud separates entirely from the cooler hell the heatsink is the exact same design as well...
that shroud design is good for someone that want to make diy shroud for noctua fans or any custom stuff, easy with 3d printer few standoffs, plate with mounting holes and you can have whatever you want :)
I bought a renewed Saphire RX 6600 a week ago (very similar looking design) and went trough the same experience with the play in the frame. I tried tightening the screws as well and it didn't work. But the card itself worked perfectly with decent temps and it was a gift for someone else, so I didn't mess with it too much. I would buy again.
I am happy to see GPU tear downs again! I like watching these even if I don't buy the model. Thanks for the content!
Another advantage of being able to remove the shroud without removing the heatsink is that if a fan stops working you can easily replace the stock fans with two case fans which can improve cooling performance assuming that you aren't using very low quality fans.
Tech jesus work hard to bring us the necessary information 😊
the easy removal of the fan shroud also makes cleaning much easier, always did that on my rx580 pulse
vibration transfer that is why the shroud is spring loaded, to minimise that from the fans spinning. You call it cheap I call that good engineering, rather a card that feels cheap to handle than a card that is more likely to break over time from use. Surprised you missed that, seems obvious to me. why add complexity to the design otherwise? as it's just more cost to make the shroud spring loaded.
EDIT: regarding your closing remarks, think about it the shroud is screwed in directly to the pcb itself instead of the heatsink, that is why they spring loaded. It's not cheap and sapphire are actually the best AMD board partner, they have always produced the best performing designs and they actually have solid history of quality and innovation with their cards. Sapphire in the past was the lie support AMD/ATI needed to stay alive but oh how people forget who buttered their bread for them.
4:06 as soon as I hear Steve say "Someone's been in here", dankpods immediately screams this in my head.
I recently cleaned and reposted my 5600XT Sapphire Pulse and the construction is nearly identical. Very easy to maintain, good to see they have not gotten away from this.
As usual, great video. My last card (RX 570 Nitro+ 8GB version) and my current one (RX 6700 XT Pulse 12GB) are both from Sapphire. Great cards and good quality, I highly recommend them.
Love the Sapphire brand.I have bought lots of Sapphire cards throughout the years and never had any issues with them.They are the Evga of AMD.
The card for my first self built PC was a Sapphire HD 4850. Was happy with it. When I upgraded I went for an HD 7850 and went with Sapphire again. That card was a legend, really good. Still works too. For my second self built I went over to team green. Reviews made it seem the GTX 970 was a fantastic card.....I found the performance pretty disappointing. It was an ASUS Stryx. I sold it and got a second hand GTX 980 ti also by ASUS. That card unfortunately died suddenly for no discernible reason. I was playing Sunset Overdrive, my screen went black and it just....freaking died. I had used it for about a year or two and the previous owner had it for a year.
The market wasn't that great at the time but I went with the RTX 2060 by Gigabyte. Around the performance of my previous card, I went with RTX cause I didn't mind paying for the new tech. In hindsight it was a good choice, DLSS 2 definitely helped push out extra performance. The card is a loud piece of crap but it did pretty well.
Originally I wanted to go for a 3070 or even 3080. But then the dark times happened. I opted to go for a monitor upgrade instead (1440p ultrawide baby).
Looking back at it I feel I dodged a bullet, looking at the lacking RAM on those models. Plus I really hate how Nvidia conducted itself. I really like stuff like DLSS but they simply don't deserve my money.
Since I was going back to AMD going with Sapphire was the obvious choice, pretty much the number 1 in AMD cards as far as I am concerned.
My RX 7900 XT Pulse is really quiet. It's not like sitting next to a freaking blow-dryer anymore.
Though I have to say, it's a good thing the card went down by about 400 bucks or else I wouldn't have gotten it either.
I gotta say I like AMD's software a lot better over the Gforce Experience (stop making me log in for driver updates Nvidia....ffs). And I don't know what it is, some people call me crazy but....I SWEAR the colours look better on AMD cards for some reason.
I was wondering if the shroud looseness couldn't be intentional, acting like a damper for vibrations?
It’s nice to see a basic little card that’s easy to take apart for repair. You don’t see that much these days now.
Both my 6800xt and my 7900xtx are sapphire cards that I got after being impressed by the engineering of their cards in previous teardown GN has done. I don't have anything to compare them against, but so far I'm happy with them.
I bought my Sapphire Pulse RX6800 (non-XT) because of the quality Steve found in Sapphire cards in his reviews and tear downs. It has been a good experience.
The thing I love most about Sapphire's cards is the attention to detail. I don't mean fit-&-finish. I mean having sufficient openings for air to vent. I mean having sufficient VRMs. I mean the simplicity of their designs.
The looseness is vibration dampening on the outer fan shroud. There's literally no reason whatsoever to have springs there if not for that reason. I forget model, but one of my old Nvidia cards had this as well. I know, because the first time i took it apart, a couple of springs got lost, re installation resulted in a noisier card.
If I had one I wont mind how "cheap" it might feel, if it performs and provides easy dust cleaning I would be more than happy.
Thanks for doing a teardown of a partner card, I would love to see them more consistantly because it is hard now to know how serviceable is what you are buying since you stopped doing these kind of videos.
Love the design of this card. I've been thinking about getting a new eGPU for my Laptop and having AV1 encode might be very useful as eGPUs can currently only be connected via 4x pcie.
Might pick this one up once the price has come down a bit.
Always a good sign when the video starts with Steve talking about the card's Jiggle Physics.
Great review. I'd buy this 7600 over the others because of serviceability features for the shroud and fan - it's the small things that matter between the various 7600s.
My use case for the 7600 would be for light gaming and AV1 encode/decode. I don't know if AMD's AV1 encode/decode on 7xxx series is any good or not (more research required). Would love to see GN do series on 264/265/AV1/VP9 GPU encoding/decoding
8:15 my GTX 1060 Asus dual also has this, I did it recently for cleaning.
Love that shroud looks super easy to work on without accidentally yanking out a tiny little cable wound in to the guts of that heatsink.
16:44 the fan connector seems to be a minimal option, there's at least two more pins that are unpopulated.
The way they design this card is awesome. Sure the looseness might feel cheap but giving the trade off is how easy it is to work on, I'll take that plus once its in the system and it don't make any noise or rattle, the movement wouldn't matter.
The advantage of a removable shroud (and keeping the heatsink on the card) is the ability to fit your own fans of choice for quieter cooling. De-shrouding, in other words. But ideally the heatsink needs to be flat with no protruding obstacles that would prevent fan mounting, and it looks like this one would work fine.
Is the shroud vibration damped at all? having it slightly loose would be a good thing for noise if it's set up properly.
I currently have a sapphire 7900 in my box & even pulling 400W keeping it's tj in the 70Cs, I can't hear it over the near-idling fans on the CPU cooler, it's crazy how well engineered the cooling is.
Reminds me of my oldie Asus GTX970 Strix ... build similar way 😉And yeah replaced/modded the fans with black 90mm Noctuas. Card still running in my nephews PC to this day.
I have the Sapphire Pulse RX 6800 and the cooler is pretty similar. Makes me curious if that play in the shroud is present on mine as well. I don't recall there being an anchor screw on the backplate. Either way, it performs really well so I may not even bother until servicing is necessary.
Hey bro. Can you share some things about thermals? Max, normal, fan rpm, watts??? Please that'll help a lot!
@SheranAslam max thermals I see in my system(Corsair 4000D) is 58C and about 70 on hot spot. It never really goes above that. It'll vary based on the game(RT, etc) from 50-58 with a high flow case. Max fan speed that I allow is 50%. Idle temps are low 30s... power draw can vary from game to game but I see anywhere between 180 to a little over 200 depending on RT etc. OC is set to 2450MHz on the core and VRAM is at 2150MHz
@@Shwadeybabe thank you so much bro. I appreciate your support!
Sapphire did pretty well this time. Sapphire RX 6600 pulse had only 1 heatpipe. Only 1! RX 7600 has 2. That's an improvement. and as Steve said Shroud design got better.
I am glad Sapphire did their homework this time. Should I buy RX7600, I guess Pulse model is going to be my first choice.
That's a great card! Sapphire makes amazing graphics cards. And I just always found AMDs GPUs so much better looking than Nvidias ones^^
7:09 my first & current gpu, a PNY GTX 1650, has a similar shroud design. It really helps with cleaning actually
I'm planning to get this card. I like how they design the shroud and looks easy to clean the fans.
No thermal test comparison chart with the AMD model?
3:30, thats more movement than Ninja ever saw
The card tears down pretty much the same as the RX 6600 Pulse. A few differences, like dual heat pipes vs a single long one, a finer fin stack on the 6600, the bar for the VRM pads. The shroud is attached the same. The fans are attached the same. Same fans. Same back plate for the most part, though the 6600 is a smaller card with out the heatsink over hang. The numbers on the 6600 are good over all with low to no noise, temps that never get too hot and the single 8 pin so power draw is exactly what is expected. FPS is pretty much good for all out at 1080p and this card is aimed at that market, but can apparently perform well at slightly reduced settings for 1440p. I don't have a 1440p monitor so IDK.
7:55 I think my Gigabyte 1660Ti disassembles in a similar manner, I replaced the thermal paste on it just a couple of weeks ago and I think I could seperate the fan shroud including the fans from the cooler with unscrewing the heatsink.
many of the 6600xts had a similar fan shroud design. So nice to be able to fully clean the card without disturbing paste and thermal pads.
The blank connector is interresting because of the DI port.
Often DI means Digital IN and DO Digital OUT.
The same is used for Analog ports too.
It seems to fit the ARGB header pinout, so the assumption that this could be used to easily feed in RGB to sync the card's "bling" to the rest of the system seems reasonable (and actually much simpler and more compatible than adding a separate RGB controller to the card; everyone who wants to use RGB will have their preferred controller in the system anyways).
Steve, have you ever heard of "reworking"? When a manufacturer uses low-quality parts (GigaByte PSUs) or low-quality assembly processes, there is a high percentage of defective parts. To try and keep profits sky-high, they will attempt to "repair" these faulty assemblies. A "factory fresh" part may have been "repaired" two or three times before being shipped.
Edward Demming showed that it is cheaper to use quality parts and superior assembly processes. But only the Japanese listen to him.
Schlieren photography for the airflow pattern for the exhaust air? The red residue looks like Loctite 262 Permanent Threadlocker.
8:25 I wish all cards were like this so I could use my three 140s as my GPU fans
I've had multiple Sapphire cards. They've all been very high quality.
Personally, the fan shroud being like that wouldn't bother me. Unless it rattled.
My next AMD card will be Sapphire as well.
Steve said he didn't notice a rattle during testing, so I think people who buy this will be fine.
Looks really good for a 150$ card!
that cooler design i think is brilliant at this price point, is straight to the point and really painless to set just some noctua fans in if you want or even use that cooler in another gpu as a spare if the worst comes to that gpu, i think is quite awesome design allowing for really long service life
I have the Sapphire Pulse RX 6700 and it feels of high quality. When I finally got the card, I reviewed the video that was done on here for it as one of the determining factors for me buying it. The backplate looks like it might potentially be the same one that Sapphire used on the 6700.
And $19 for an easy fan replacement after a quick Google search. I'd be happy to always see my GPU tear-down like that.
I've always liked how simple AMD partner cards have been, even if they feel a little cheap the always work well.
I wonder if a respin of the shroud molds with slightly thicker spacers would help the looseness. Just enough to add more stiffness. Given the cost of making molds and the low price-point of this card it's almost certainly not worth doing for this product. But for a future product design that might be all that's needed.
Seeing that the shroud is connected with springs under the screws I wonder if its deliberately loose to reduce noise and vibration?
8:15 i have a palit dual oc gtx 1080, it is exactly same build as this card. It was built in 2018 march, fan died last year. It was rather easy to change it like 5-10 minutes. The fan was branded as firstd
The shroud thingy is way more worse on my card, it's all wobbly, sagging, shaking, you name it. But since i put it in the case and never look it again, like i did that i bought skylake machine and never ever touched anything apart from an m2 ssd and gpu. So it is not a problem if you don't open your case every time and touch it as a pervert...
My last 3 GPUs were Sapphire. Are very reliable!
Would love a teardown of the nitro+ 7900 xtx, by the way.
Your lesson about screw placements from the original 7600 disassembly video, you kind of see what a difference it makes in a GPU compared to this one
the RX 7700 and 7800 will restore balance and happiness in the gaming community. Forget everything that is currently being released and be patient for those cards, trust me
i hope so
Good job sapphire, thats easy to access and clean, pride sapphire 6700xt user here
actually you dont have to take the whole shroud off to replace or clean a fan.
they are secured with a tiny screw, that you can reach from the top between the blades and just take the fan out this way.
most comfortable way to replace a dead fan that i have seen so far :)
I love the Sapphire brand and really love the Pulse series as well.
like the old fan assemblies that have the shroud that just clips on to the heat sink
This looks like a card that would be awesome to mod in term of fan and fan shroud.
my 5700xt pulse had the same issue Its that the screws on the shroud are spring loaded and the shroud is supposed to "free float" and thus reduce resonance vibrations from the dual axial fans causing interference
I hope Sapphire keeps making good AMD GPU. They have done good job over the last 2 decades. Good work.
The wiggle is probably the long standoffs for the screws in the shroud
10:15 i have 5600XT, it launched at $270 and it had dual bios. Kinda sad that didnt keep that option but most of us are going to run it at performance mode anyways.
I just bought this card at 220 dlls here in Mexico during a sale, I upgraded from a first Gen 2060. The sagging shroud is also present in my card, but it seems a bit firm at the far end of the card.
I am thinking about asking a friend to 3d print me another shroud so I can accommodate a couple Noctuas, to see if it makes a difference.