Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro Review

Conclusion

If you came here from our review of the AMD card then you’ll know how impressed we are with the newest addition to the Radeon range. Whilst the RX 7900 XTX is still their mack-daddy, the RX 7800 XT is designed squarely at the 1080P, 1440 crowd. Whilst the market might scream about the importance of 4K gaming, the numbers from Steam and sheer monitor sales figures show that most people don’t have the display to game at 4K and the expense necessary to really make the most of it is way outside the remit of a card sitting at this price point. We would always rather have all the bells and whistles at 1440 than cut down the settings to make 4K workable.

Naturally when you go from the AMD designed twin fan cooler to the kind of beefy cooler with which the Sapphire Nitro comes equipped there is a significant drop in temperatures, but even taking that into account the 23°C drop is hugely impressive. We’d already had our jaw dropped when this cooler came on the RX 7900 XTX, so having it on a GPU that is less demanding architecturally ensures a ridiculously low temperature. Certainly if you want to overclock the Sapphire Nitro then there is plenty of thermal headroom.

Speaking of clock speed, the Sapphire Nitro is rated out of the box at 2254 MHz stock, with a potential boost of a whopping 2565 MHz. During our testing we saw a peak of 2369 MHz and an average of 2116 MHz. Not quite the numbers that Sapphire list, but it’s worth mentioning that none of the new 7000 series cards we’re looking at today managed to hit the numbers that are listed on their specification pages, and yet the performance was still excellent. We’ve always got the slight caveat that we’re on pre-release drivers so who knows what performance will get unlocked with the proper Adrenaline release.

If the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is a superb blend of great performance across a wide range of titles, particularly those able to enable AMDs FSR, then the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro is a faster, cooler, quieter, better looking version of that, which is more than enough reason to award it our OC3D Enthusiast award.

   

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