Overall and Final Verdict
I’ve been a big fan of what Sapphire has been doing with their Pulse cards all across their lineup. They have hit the sweet spot where they aren’t putting out a low-quality card, the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC has a full coverage metal backplate and an overclock. But they have skipped out on a lot of the “gamer” focused stuff that might be flashy but also starts to run the pricing up like lighting. In its place, the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC has a simple clean cooler design with some red accents on the front and back and there isn’t too much for branding. They also bridge that gap in card size with a design that I wouldn’t call compact it is taller and longer than cards in this range used to be but it ends up being more compact than the XFX Qick RX 7600 XT that I took a look at and other than in some SFF situations the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC isn’t going to have any fitment issues. Sapphire has also gone with a few features that are a good fit with the targeted audience like an extra HDMI port and still having PCIe power plugs (not that any of the AMD cards are doing differently).
The RX 7600 XT offers twice the VRAM as the original RX 7600, but beyond that, it is otherwise just a higher-clocked card. So when getting into testing we do see the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC run right in the middle of the overclocked RX 7600s in a lot of tests and even though it has the same clock speed as the XFX card the XFX averaged higher across the board. This being an overclocked version of an upclocked card really hurt things when it came to power efficiency which the AMD cards already struggle with. In the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC specific tests its smaller cooler did have to work harder and was a little noisier under load and at 50% fan speed but surprisingly at 100% fan speed it was near the bottom of our charts. It did really well in all of the 1080p testing, and was capable of gaming at 1440p in a lot of situations, especially with its larger VRAM. That includes outperforming the RTX 4060 in just about every test but like I said before it was also right with the RX 7600 in a lot of tests sitting around 5 FPS higher at 1080p.
In the end, the RX 7600 XT is designed for users who like the RX 7600 but want more VRAM. While you also get a bump in performance from the clock speeds as well that additional VRAM only helps in some situations, especially at the 1080p resolution that the RX 7600 XT is most likely to be played at. So I still recommend the RX 7600 for a majority of people but the 7600 XT is a nice option for those looking for more VRAM. As for the Pulse RX 7600 XT OC specifically, I once again like the card design but the other cards tested did put up a big fight against it in the same price range where with the original RX 7600 the Pulse was the value card to get.
Live Pricing: HERE
