INTRODUCTION

    It's been quite a long road for both NVIDIA and their GeForce RTX 5xxx series and AMD and their Radeon RX 9xxx series but we're finally days away before the first reviews make it online (if all goes well, from what I hear some issues have risen so it could be a bumpy launch for the latter) and so what better way to prepare for that than to test not one but two of the latest AMD cards launched by Sapphire? Well as the review title states today with me, I have both the Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and the Pure AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT models by Sapphire which I've been testing for almost 2 full months now.

    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 market addressing gaming and performance graphics hardware enthusiasts, as well as delivering an array of embedded technology solutions and commercial graphics products.

    The Radeon RX 7700 XT is based on the Navi 32 GPU by AMD and thus uses the same RDNA3 graphics architecture as the Radeon RX 7600/7800/7900 models. The Navi 32 is manufactured using EUV lithography (5nm process) and aside a brand new AI accelerator it also packs 54 RDNA 3 compute units, 3456 stream processors, 96 raster units (or render output units), 54 ray accelerators (or ray tracing cores), 216 texture mapping units, 3 shader engines, 48MB of Infinity Cache and a total of 108 AI accelerators. VRAM amount for the Radeon RX 7700 XT series is set at 12GB of 18Gbps GDDR6 (either by SK Hynix or Samsung) based on a 192-bit bus interface. Needless to say, both the Nitro+ and Pure models by Sapphire feature better cooling (tri-fan, dual heatsink models - 3 slots required for the former and 2.5 slots for the latter), metal backplates, dedicated VRM cooling (Nitro+), ARGB lighting (Nitro+), fuse protection, dual-BIOS (Nitro+), higher clocks and higher total power draw limits. To be precise the Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT sports a game clock of 2276MHz and a boost clock of 2599MHz whereas the Pure AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT comes ready with a game clock set at 2226MHz and a boost clock set at 2584MHz (as opposed to the stock 2171/2544MHz clocks). Moving to total power draw the higher clocked Nitro+ is configured for up to 252W whereas the Pure is configured for up to 240W. Finally in terms of connectivity both the Nitro+ and Pure AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT cards by Sapphire feature two DisplayPort v2.1 outputs and two HDMI v2.1a outputs.