SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 8G Review

[Brent_Justice]

Introduction



On December 12th, 2019, AMD launched its Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU as part of the Radeon RX 5500 series.  We reviewed a retail card at the time, the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4G GDDR6 OC video card.  That video card had the standard 4GB of GDDR6 onboard, but AMD has a trick up its sleeve with the Radeon RX 5500 XT.The Radeon RX 5500 XT can support 8GB of GDDR6.  That’s right, at the time of the launch AMD announced two variants of the Radeon RX 5500 XT. There would be those with 4GB GDDR6 with an MSRP of $169.99 and also 8GB variants starting at a much higher MSRP of $199.99. Today we have the 8GB variant to test for you in the same SAPPHIRE PULSE brand. ...

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[Space_Ranger]

Nice review. The card tested as I expected it. The additional VRAM isn't really needed as the card just can't crunch the #'s quickly enough to do 1440p (where the 8Gb would come in handy).

 

[Grimlakin]

Just curious... would testing it on a system with PCIE 4.0 make a discernible difference in performance? Sapphire lists it as a PICE 4.0 supporting card.

 

[Burticus]

No driver problems? Do they have the kinks worked out yet?

 

[Brent_Justice]

Just curious... would testing it on a system with PCIE 4.0 make a discernible difference in performance? Sapphire lists it as a PICE 4.0 supporting card.

Unlikely, unless you were constrained purely by VRAM and it was having to cache out of local VRAM often, which doesn't seem to be the case in our testing.

However, we will re-run benchmarks and test directly PCIe 3.0 versus 4.0 in the future. We have many good articles planned, and that is one of them.

 

[Brent_Justice]

No driver problems? Do they have the kinks worked out yet?

No driver issues reported on my end