Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ Review - triple-slot beast!

alright guys Dominic here for kick Guru and today the RX 7800 XT reviews continue as we are checking out the sapphire Nitro plus this card features an incredibly eye-catching design with an LED light bar it's got support for dual bios as well as a thick triple slot cooler in my view Sapphire has been making some of the finest AMD bass graphics cards over the last few years and today we're gonna find out if this 539 pound Nitro plus can live up to that billing [Music] EK nucleus AIO your first step towards efficient Cooling getting right into it with a look at the design then if you saw our review of the 7900 XTX Nitro plus at the end of last year then you are going to recognize the 7800 XT Nitro plus but that is a very good thing that's because in my opinion this is up there with the very best looking GPU designs on the market right now the gray shroud wraps beautifully around both the front and the ends of the card almost creating the sense that it's a unibody design it's not but it looks incredibly sleek and I absolutely love the color we do get a good look at the triple fan setup as well these utilize sapphires angular velocity fan blade design and each measures 100 millimeters in diameter these fans also feature Sapphire's Quick Connect technology something we have seen a few years but it simply means you can actually remove each fan simply by unscrewing just one screw per fan which is a great feature in terms of its stand dimensions then this is a pretty large 7800 XT it actually measures in at 320 by 134.9 by 61.6 millimeters so it's well over 60 centimeters in length and it is a proper triple slot card that will take up three expansion slots in your case it also weighed in at 1.6 kilograms on my scales on the front of the card then we can get a good look at that argb light bar that runs the whole length of the card in my opinion this is a lovely RGB implementation the LEDs blend very well together and there are no visible hotspots there's even an on-board argb header if you want to connect the card to your motherboard via an argb cable and synchronize the lighting that way as for the back plate then this is again made of gray metal and runs the length of the card though we can see a relatively large cut out towards the end just to allow air to pass through the heatsink the sapphire logo here as well is another RGB Zone on the Nitro plus also on the back of the card then we can see the Dual bios switch which is positioned next to the i o bracket this will give you a choice of either the OC or the silent modes but there's even a third setting to allow you to toggle between those two bios modes using the sapphire tricks software another extra feature is the addition of a 4 pin pwm fan header at the end of the PCB and this is great just for simply letting you connect up a case fan and have it directly controlled by the gpu's temperature in terms of the power connectors then we see two apron connections I use which is pretty standard while display outputs consist of two HDMI and two DisplayPort again an increasingly common display output allocation moving on to the PCB then now despite being a Nitro plus card the o4 design here does look very similar to the reference PCB with an 11 plus 3 vrm configuration 7 anti-amp Monolithic Power Systems mp87997 mosfets are used throughout and there's also a trio of Monolithic mp2856 controllers the cooler meanwhile utilizes two Hefty fin stacks and these are connected by five six millimeter heat pipes the GPU makes contact with a copper base plate while the memory meets a slightly raised section of copper there's also four other secondary base plates that handle the vrm cooling no no no no no no no no no no no no no no as good looking as this card is then it is time to move on from the design and take a look at our benchmarks for this we used our regular GPU test system which is provided to us by PC specialist and this is based on Intel's I9 3900ks CPU paired with the gigabyte z790 gaming XX motherboard and we've got 32 gigabytes of Corsair Dominator Platinum ddr5 RGB memory kicking off then with the thermal performance of course the Nitro plus does very well here with the OC bios recording a peak GPU temperature of 62 degrees now there is a slightly larger disparity between the GPU and hotspot temperature with the Nitro plus compared to the other cars we reviewed with the latter temperature hitting 88 degrees perhaps indicating a slight imperfection with the cooling mounting system but we do also know that amd's chiplet based gpus are not perfectly flat due to the McD and the gcds being slightly different heights the silent bios also does run a touch hotter but still offers a noticeable improvement over the reference card hitting 70 degrees for the GPU and 91 degrees for the hotspot noise levels are also a real success story for the Nitro plus even using the OC bios we saw fan speed hit just 25 or 1150 RPM barely registering at 33 decibels on my sound meter switching to the silent bios drops this further with a fan speed of just 17 or 810 RPM which is absurdly slow and at that point we actually hit our ambient noise floor of 32 decibels in other words the card ran so quietly it became impossible for me to accurately measure its noise levels in my environment for our noise normalized testing then I increased fan speed to 47 or just under 1900 RPM and that produced 40 decibels of noise re-running the thermal test then with that increased fan speed so the GPU temperature dropped to 55 degrees with the hotspot at 82. now this isn't quite as good as the power color hellhound which it has to be said has a really impressive cooler but for the Nitro plus this is still a huge improvement over the reference card and it does beat out the gigabyte gaming OC power draw meanwhile has been increased by almost 40 watts compared to amd's reference card that's when looking at the OC bios at least which pulled just over 285 Watts though the card silent whilst is more frugal this time drawing 256 Watts for the OC Wireless then the Nitro plus is able to use this extra power budget to bump up the clock speed as we saw this whilst running at 24 46 megahertz over our 30 minute stress test and that makes it just 20 megahertz faster than the power color hellhound but it is actually 112 megahertz faster than amd's reference card as for the Nitro Plus's silent bios this does run slower averaging 2319 megahertz though that is still only a touch behind the reference design as expected then that clock speed means real world gaming performance isn't overly exciting as the Nitro plus comes in just two to three percent faster than amd's reference card and it's on par with the power color hellhound as a reminder we do not focus heavily on game benchmarks in these aib reviews as the performance differences are simply very small but if you do want to see performance in a wider number of games check out those small performance gains then coupled with the increased power draw we saw earlier does mean that efficiency is reduced for the Nitro plus as we can see performance per watts is 12 percent worse than the reference 7800 XT moving on to overclocking then for this I maximize both the power limit slider and the maximum clock frequency slider before trying to undervolt the card as far as possible my sample was stable with the voltage at just 930 millivolts while I pushed up the memory speed to 2630 megahertz or just over 21 gigabits per second effective this overclock then brought the cards real world clock speed up by around 380 megahertz averaging 28 21 megahertz in our 30 minute stress test which it also managed with a hundred percent stability this extra frequency then boosted our frame rates by between 11 and 12 in the three titles I retested overclocking is definitely worth doing for the 7800 XT provided you don't mind the increase in power draw now I say that because the Nitro plus Drew just under 340 watts when overclocked which is a 52 watt or 18 increase compared to its default settings naturally that does also result in diminished efficiency with the Nitro plus now offering seven percent worse performance per watt compared to its stock settings as I mentioned at the start of the video then Sapphire's Nitro plus Series has undoubtedly built up a strong reputation over the last few years and the 7800 XT Nitro plus is no different a hundred percent a key part of this card's appeal comes down to its visual appearance this is simply a sexy graphics card and I make absolutely no apologies for using that description the design alone is definitely enough to help it stand out from the crowd but the beauty is not just skin deep as the cooler itself is pretty good out of the box we saw the card run at just 62 degrees on the GPU while fan speeds are incredibly low regardless of which bios you are using now it may not be quite so impressive as the power color hellhound when looking at noise normalized thermals but even so this cooler is more than enough to deal with the 290 watt load of the GPU as for actual gaming performance this was about as expected with only small gains in the two to three percent region over the 7800 XT overclocking though saw further gains of between 11 and 12 so this is well worth doing if you do pick up a 7800 XT provided you are happy with power draw increasing by about 50 watts in terms of pricing then Sapphire communicated to us before the launch of this GPU that it's got a 529 pound MSRP but based on current retail prices it is selling for more than that I found it for 540 pounds at scan while at OC UK it's even retailing for 560 pounds that does mean the Nitro plus comes in a fair bit closer to the RTX 4070 than I'd like with 4070s themselves now starting at 570 pounds and that GPU does offer a better efficiency Superior Ray tracing performance and all the benefits you get from dlss2 and dlss3 that being said it is definitely worth considering that while RTX 4070s may start at 570 pounds the actual cars you can get at that price point at the entry level are significantly cut back both in terms of their features their coolers and the visual appeal is absolutely nothing close to that of the Nitro plus in my opinion if you had to find an RTX 4070 that's more of an equivalent to the Nitro plus you're probably looking at something like the gigabyte Aero model and that is about a hundred pounds more expensive keeping that in mind then I am still happy to recommend the sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro plus as it is a cracking card and looks absolutely fantastic yes I do think it is a bit too close to the RTX 4070 for comfort so hope hopefully it will drop down closer to its MSRP soon but if you do pick one up I have no doubt you'll be very happy with it that is going to do it then for all of you guys so if you liked it please do toss me a thumbs up and as always let me know your thoughts down in the comments below if you haven't subscribed please do that and ding that notification Bell and why not come chat with us on our Discord server which is again Linked In the description while you're there you can also support us by picking up a new t-shirt on our merch store and if you're feeling particularly generous why not consider backing us on patreon that's it for this one though guys I'm Dominic for kick Guru and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: KitGuruTech

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Id: QoIwLLGBTMk

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023