Conclusion
In our review today we took a look at a brand new line of video cards from SAPPHIRE, with its brand new “PURE” series. SAPPHIRE offers two PURE cards in its lineup right now, with a Radeon RX 7700 XT-based video card and a Radeon RX 7800 XT-based video card. Today we had a chance to look at the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC-based model.
The SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC has a decked-out all-white theme, with three fans and Tri-X cooling technology, and also has a factory overclock. The SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC bumps up the design and clock speeds compared to the PULSE model that we have reviewed and thus bumps up the price premium slightly to $469. We compared this video card against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB Founders Edition and focused on the 1440p gameplay experience.
Performance
To start, it is quite obvious that the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC is the choice in plain rasterized gaming. Every game in the suite was smoothly playable at high FPS. Our test card was the fastest in 6/6 games. Even when upscaling was enabled the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC was fastest in all but one game. The average margin was 19% faster whether default or upscaled. Both cards managed playable frames in all games except Forspoken, where the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB FE had some trouble without upscaling. A few of the games even hit triple-digit FPS.
When we toggle on Ray Tracing things changed a little, but surprisingly not as much as we have seen in the past. Overall only one game was playable without upscaling, owned by the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC. The results otherwise were 2 games apiece and 1 tie with upscaling added. That is pretty amazing. Cyberpunk 2077 was too much for either video card, regardless of upscaling. The average margin was in favor of the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB by 7%. So we see that AMD is gaining in Ray Tracing abilities, which is good to see.
Overclocking
We demonstrate here what we have seen with nearly all the new factory overclocked Radeon RX 7000 series from AMD, there is not much headroom for added manual overclocking beyond the pre-set factory overclock. For the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC it arrives out-of-the-box with a 45MHz overclock which amounts to 2.5%. We managed to squeak out another 1% through tinkering with the Radeon software. But, you can see in the real-time testing on the best performance we only made it to about a 3% increase in FPS.
When the Radeon RX 7700 XT is shipped with a factory overclock, manufacturers like SAPPHIRE are already pushing the GPU to its limits given the power budget it operates in. This is good news, as it means you are getting everything out of the GPU out-of-the-box, nothing is being left on the table. SAPPHIRE has the Radeon RX 7700 XT dialed in with this video card, and within the power limits provided, has designed the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT to deliver everything it can by default. It is designed well, and the cooling is more than adequate for the performance it provides.
Final Points
The SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC is a very well-designed white video card, with a red LED logo. The card is sturdy, looks good, and has a very capable cooling system. This video card performs very well when compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti FE 8GB. It dominated plain raster performance and held up well in Ray Tracing, actually quite well.
The all-white aesthetic will look excellent in an all-white, black, or any color really, build. With this unique look, SAPPHIRE can separate itself from the masses of Radeon RX 7700 XTs and offer something striking. SAPPHIRE also gives the video card a nice factory overclock, so it isn’t just pretty, but it also performs, it has real benefits over a stock reference Radeon RX 7700 XT in performance. The factory overclock leaves nothing on the table and allows it to overtake the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB in value.
With the SAPPHIRE PURE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC you get better performance, great cooling, and importantly 12GB of VRAM for better performance in games moving forward, it will just last longer. Therefore the question remains, is the price premium worth it? We would say yes.
