INTRODUCTION

   One of the things that brings out the best (and the worst sometimes) the electronics industry has to offer is competition and thanks to legendary rivalries like that between AMD and Intel and ATI and NVIDIA (AMD and NVIDIA now) there's been a staggering amount of technological leaps in their respected fields over the years and far beyond what anyone thought possible (in this small timeframe that is). For gamers of course the rivalry between ATI/AMD and NVIDIA has clearly "produced" the most "benefits" since today we have graphics cards capable of rendering games in 4k resolution and above with a plethora of graphical enhancements and at impressive frame rates. The Radeon RX 5700 XT is the latest flagship gaming graphics card by AMD and after high demand by many of our readers today I’ll be testing one of the best custom design cards based on it, the Nitro+ (Plus) model by Sapphire.

   SAPPHIRE Technology continues to be a world leading manufacturer and global supplier of innovative graphics and mainboard products, delivering its AMD Radeon based products to the PC markets addressing gaming, eSports and performance graphics enthusiasts as well as delivering an array of professional graphics products and embedded system solutions. Recently SAPPHIRE has penetrated new markets with a series of GPU Compute server systems targeting the blockchain and commercial cryptocurrency mining businesses.

   The RX 5700 XT was released by AMD last July and is based on the latest Navi 10 (codename) silicon (manufactured at TSMC with a 7nm process) which supports the new PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 interface/bus and features their latest RDNA SIMD architecture (which according to AMD sports an 25% IPC gain over GCN). When it comes to numbers the new Navi 10 silicon sports a total of 10.3 billion transistors and features 2560 stream processors (shader units), 160 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 64 ROPs (raster operations pipelines). The Radeon RX 5700 XT cards are also equipped with 256-bit 8GB GDDR6 memory at frequencies of 14Gbps (resulting in a bandwidth of no less than 448GB/s) and video outputs that support resolutions all the way up to 8K at 60Hz, 4k at 240Hz and FHD at 360Hz over single cables. As expected however the Radeon RX 5700 XT Nitro+ by Sapphire takes things many steps further compared to the vanilla version by using higher clocks (2010MHZ Boost/1905MHZ Gaming/1770MHZ Base) and adding several features such as an top of the line tri-fan cooling system (offers superior VRM and memory cooling), fuse protection for the PCI-E power connectors, black diamond chokes, dual-BIOS, ARGB lighting (3 zones) and an aluminum backplate. No wonder this is considered one of the best Radeon RX 5700 XT cards in the market today right?