Sapphire is no stranger to thinking outside of the box when it comes to their graphics card designs. They were one of the first to go all-in on vapor chamber cooling back in their Vapor-X days, they went wild with flowthrough designs for the Fury cards, and they really went to town on the R9 285 with an ITX version. Now they’ve taken that passion and delivered on the baby Navi 14 chip with their small form factor focused Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT SF.
The design of the Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT SF delivers the full RX 5500 XT design in just 177.2mm in length. Staying within the 2 slot design signature of their Pulse cards means the owner doesn’t have to make concessions with most small form factor cases on the market. Taking the cooling aspect down a notch from the full-size Pulse RX 5500 XT we see the SF sporting aa single fan cooler but as cool as the Navi 14 die runs it shouldn’t have any trouble keeping the 135w TDP in check. One thing that might have been a good move for the SFF crown would have been if the 8-pin PCIe power connector was on the rear of the card.
When it comes to speeds and feeds of the Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT SF we see basically the same specifications as the full-size Pulse RX 5500 XT with the 1408 Navi based Stream Processors running at a Base Block speed of 1685MHz, a Game Clock of 1737MHz, and a Boost Clock of 1845MHz. This model is available in both 4GB and 8GB models, both in the 14Gbps flavor on the 128-bit bus resulting in a memory bandwidth of 224GB/s making 1080p gaming a breeze.
I know we’re on the cusp of a new lineup coming from the Red Team but it could be some time still before we see the more cost-conscious crowd getting some attention. While I applaud Sapphire for delivering something unique to the SFF enthusiasts I can’t help but wonder why not go wild and do this with the 5600XT?
AMD Radeon RX 5000 ‘7nm Navi RDNA’ GPU Lineup Specs:
| Graphics Card | Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary | Radeon RX 5700 XT | Radeon RX 5700 | Radeon RX 5600 XT | Radeon RX 5500 XT | Radeon RX 5300 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU Architecture | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) | 7nm Navi (RDNA 1st Gen) |
| Stream Processors | 2560 SPs | 2560 SPs | 2304 SPs | 2304 SPs | 1408 SPs | 1408 SPs |
| TMUs / ROPs | 160 / 64 | 160 / 64 | 144 / 64 | 144 / 64 | 88 / 32 | 88 / 32 |
| Base Clock | 1680 MHz | 1605 MHz | 1465 MHz | 1130 MHz | 1670 MHz | TBD |
| Boost Clock | 1980 MHz | 1905 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1560 MHz | 1845 MHz | 1645 MHz |
| Game Clock | 1830 MHz | 1755 MHz | 1625 MHz | 1375 MHz | 1717 MHz | 1448 MHz |
| Compute Power | 10.14 TFLOPs | 9.75 TFLOPs | 7.95 TFLOPs | 7.19 TFLOPs | 5.19 TFLOPs | 4.63 TFLOPs |
| VRAM | 8 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 | 6 GB GDDR6 | 8 GB GDDR6 4 GB GDDR6 |
3 GB GDDR6 |
| Bus Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit | 96-bit |
| Bandwidth | 448 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 448 GB/s | 288 GB/s | 224 GB/s | 168 GB/s |
| TBP | 235W | 225W | 180W | 150W | 130W | 100W |
| Price | $449 US | $399 US | $349 US | $279 US | $169 US (4 GB) $199 US (8 GB) |
$129 US? |
| Launch | 7th July 2019 | 7th July 2019 | 7th July 2019 | 21st January, 2020 | 7th October 2019 | 28th August, 2020 |
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