Shipping delays and issues hit us hard over the last few weeks. The biggest one was our RX 6500 XT launch sample which ended up hung up and delayed in shipping. So I am way late to the party when it comes to checking out how the RX 6500 XT performs. Today I finally get the chance and I’m checking out the Pulse from Sapphire. I know there was drama around this launch (frankly what GPU launched for the last few years hasn’t lol) but I am excited to see how AMD's latest GPU performs and how Sapphire card does at keeping things cool and quiet. So let’s jump in and check it out!

Product Name: Sapphire Pulse RX 6500 XT

Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Before diving into the testing, I do like to double-check with GPUz to make sure that our card is running at the clock speeds that it should be at and the Sapphire Pulse RX 6500 XT is running at 2685 MHz with a boost clock of 2825 MHz which line up with Sapphires specifications. The boost clock isn’t much past the AMDs reference boost clock of 2815 MHz but the game clock speed is a little higher of an overclock with that being 2610 MHz to the 2685 MHz. I also include this so our firmware revision is documented and as well as the driver tested with which is the Adrenalin 22.1.2 that is the post-launch public driver.

Packaging

The box for the Sapphire Pulse 6500 XT was surprisingly small even when compared to the EVGA 3050 that I just took a look at last week. Sapphire didn’t waste any extra space on this one and I like that. The box has a black to dark grey background and in the top left corner, they have a white accent that is similar to the backplates that Sapphire has been designing for a while now. They have the Sapphire logo in that corner and also to the right along with the Pulse branding. The EKG-like zig zags that represent your pulse are integrated into the Pulse logo itself and also in the background. Then the bright red AMD wrap around looks huge on this small box but it also means the RX 6500 XT model name is easy to spot. Sapphire has the 1080p resolution focus up on the top along with the memory size which is 4 GB and that PCIe 4.0 is supported. They also slipped in a sticker letting us know this is an overclocked card as well. On the back, most of the space is filled up with AMDs red wrap which has the minimum system requirements listed out. Beyond that Sapphire has product specifications but then only the display outputs are listed. The card dimensions would be really helpful and the clock speeds would be nice as well. Also interesting here is the newer Sapphire logo is up in the top corner but the older logo is down in the bottom right as well as on the tamper stickers.

Inside, there is a brown box that pulls out which is the main structure for everything. That box has the card inside wrapped in a static protective bubble wrap bag. Then they have some cardboard and foam used to fill in the gaps to keep everything tight and not moving around. Beyond the card itself, there aren’t any accessories other than plugs in the display connections to keep them clean. There is a small quick installation guide included and a paper with contact information for Sapphire for documentation.

Card Layout and Photos

The last Sapphire card we had come into the office was one of their Nitro+ cards, I haven’t had the chance to check out the Pulse lineup. The Pulse lineup is a little more budget-focused compared to the Nitro+ cards and that fits well with the 6500 XT as a whole. For styling, the 6500 XT Pulse has a black plastic fan shroud that extends up past the top of the PCI bracket. It has two red lines that run from end to end through the fan holes as well as similar lines molded into the plastic. It gives a nod to the angular designs that almost every card these days has, but it is a lot simpler than most which gives it a cleaner look. It wraps around the dual axial fans which also have a touch of red on the center stickers with a red ring and the red EKG in the pulse brand name.

The 6500 XT Pulse is a compact card which is a huge change from the last Nitro+ I took a look at. Sapphire has this card at 194mm long which just a few generations ago would have been a medium to long card, but compared to most of the cards now it is smaller. It is 107mm tall which is taller than the standard card height and taller than the EVGA 3050 I took a look at last week. Then for thickness, it fits right at the standard 2 slot width. It isn’t completely inside of the old PCI standard size with the height, but it's not far off.

Like I mentioned before, the 6500 XT Pulse has dual axial fans which blow down against the heatsink into the PCB. The extra height of the card allowed Sapphire to fit large fans with both being 90mm wide. They have 11 blades each and they rotate counterclockwise. The center stickers have a base metallic finish then with the red ring and the Pulse logo with the red accent on the EKG section as well. The fan blades have a slight twist to them, but significantly less than the Nitro+ cards have, and other than that the fans don’t have any other shapes to them. Looking through the fans though we can see that the heatsink design for the 6500 XT Pulse is a horizontal layout for its aluminum fins which typically is a little less efficient as the air being blow done has to run the full length of the card to get out. It will be interesting to see how the cooling is on this card.   

Looking around at the top, bottom, and end edges shows that layout as well. Sapphire has the heatpipes visible from the top and bottom and from the looks of it the heatpipes are in an S shape with the center sitting over top of the GPU itself to pull the heat out to the ends of the card. The top of the card is more open than I expected given the heatsink layout, there is some room near the power connection in the heatsink where some extra air may be able to come out. The end of the card is designed for full airflow however with vents even in the section that does have the shroud over it.

The top edge of the card does also have some branding on it. Down on the end, they have the Radeon logo printed in red. That is right below the power connection which by the way is only a 6-pin, seeing those seems to be getting rarer. Then on the far left, they also have the Sapphire logo printed in red. The 6500 XT Pulse doesn’t have any backlit branding or any lighting at all actually. This does fit with the more budget focus of the card of course.

I feel like the main issue with the 6500 XT has been beaten to death, but I do have to bring it up a little for those of you who aren’t aware. Most video cards connect with 8 or 16 PCI lanes. The 6500 XT is running the Navi 24 GPU and if you look closely here at the PCI slot you can see that they are only connected with a x4 or 4 lane connection. I will talk about how that affects things in the performance section, but it is interesting to see how there aren’t any traces going to the 2/3 of the pins on the right side of the card.

Sapphire stuck right with the overall them when it comes to the backplate for the 6500 XT. The fact that there is a backplate at all is a big surprise. This is a real metal backplate with a textured black finish that matches up well with the plastic shrouds finish. They have ventilation holes in strategic locations like behind the GPU itself, at the top edge, and of course near the end of the card where the PCB ends short and the fans are able to blow through the heatsink out the back of the card. This is huge in helping with the airflow on the horizontal heatsink layout. We can also see that Sapphire placed one of the big heatpipes right in the middle of the section as well which helps a lot as well. The red accents continue here with the Sapphire and Pulse logos both having a little red on their otherwise white font. Then there is a red EKG that runs most of the way across the backplate to the Radeon logo which is also in red. All of that is of course flipped so it is readable when the card is installed in a traditional case as well.

The PCI bracket at the end of the 6500 XT Pulse has a large ventilation section cut out that covers 2/3 of the bracket. This is important with the heatsink layout that should be pushing air this direction. The bracket has the Sapphire logo stamped into it at the bottom. Then for display connections, I was surprised to see the card only has two. You get one DisplayPort which is down at the bottom and one HDMI which is up at the top. This isn’t Sapphire specific, the 6500 XT just only has those options.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: Intel Core-i9 12900K – Live Pricing

Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: Micron Pre Launch DDR5 2x32GB – Live Pricing

Storage: Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB – Live Pricing

Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 - Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For this time around I’m mostly interested in how the RX 6500 XT compares with the new RTX 3050 and the GTX 1650 from Nvidia and the 5500 XT from AMD. The Pulse 6500 XT is overclocked compared to the stock clocked EVGA 3050 that I just reviewed but it should still be a close comparison.

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Pulse 6500 XT came in at 14909 in the base fire strike test which puts it sitting behind the RTX 3050 and ahead of the older RX 5500 XT by a good margin. Going up into the higher detail settings the limited bandwidth does show itself a little with the 5500 XT overtaking the 6500 XT by just 2 points in the Fire Strike Extreme test. But then funny enough in the Fire Strike Ultra test the 5500 XT and the 3050 both drop as well as they reach their memory bandwidth limits and the Pulse 6500 XT sits just right above them.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. The Pulse 6500 XT came in at 4919 in the base Time Spy test which is above the 5500XT but with a big margin between it and the 3050. Nvidia’s latest-gen cards favor the Time Spy test a lot more and it shows here. With the detail up to the extreme setting the 6500 XT drops down below the 5500 XT but just by a few points.

The 6500 XT does support ray tracing even though the card isn’t designed to perform well with it so I did run it in the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark which I was testing in 3DMark. It did complete the test when the GTX 1650 didn’t complete it, but that put it at the bottom of the chart of completed results with the GTX 1070 being the next highest card.

The last test was using the Unigine based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the Pulse, 6500 XT came in sitting close to but above the RX 5500 XT with the 1650 below that. The 4K optimized result on the other hand flips that around putting the 6500 XT at the bottom when trying to handle the higher resolution.

VR Benchmarks

As for Virtual Reality, I love it but it is more demanding than traditional gaming. This is partially because of the resolutions needed to render for two eyes and because they render more than what is immediately visible. But also because of post effects to get the proper “fisheye” effect for it to look proper in your eyes with the HMD. You also have to have much higher expectations for frame rates in VR, skipping frames or lower FPS can cause motion sickness in VR. Because of that, I ran a few tests.

My first test was again in Superposition. This time I tested the VR Future test using the Oculus resolution. Here the Pulse 6500 XT came in with a decent margin between it and the GTX 1650 and the 5500XT. In a lot of ways, the 6500XT is very similar to the old RX 480 which was AMD's first real VR-capable card. As it sits, it's not a great option as VR has gotten more demanding, but it can at least stick with its direct competition.

My second round of VR testing was in VRMark which has three tests that are similar to the VR tests in Superposition. I only focused on just the most demanding test called Blue Room that is looking more at future VR performance. The Pulse 6500 XT fell behind the GTX 1650 and the RX 5500 XT on this test.

In-Game Benchmarks

Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 10 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of if turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. In total, each video card is tested 54 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier to read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, and then over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors.

So how did the Pulse 6500 XT do? So let’s start at the higher resolutions. The 6500 XT is designed for 1080p gaming and with the PCI 4.0 x4 interface it’s a much harder limit than we have seen on past cards. You can see that when we see the 4K resolution results where almost every one of our results is in the unplayable range. You need to avoid 4K like the plague with the 6500 XT except for CS:GO which is our one over 60 FPS result. For comparison, the 3050 had 1 120+, 11 30+ fps results, and 7 under 30. At 1440p the Pulse 6500 XT can handle a little better. All but three results were playable and we have 1 up over 120 FPS and 3 over 60. But as a whole, it still isn’t ideal with most results in that 30-59 FPS range. But when we get into the 1080p the Pulse 6500 XT’s performance improves a lot. Every result is at least playable with 8 in the 30-59 FPS range. But then more than half are at 60 or above with two up over 120 FPS and 7 over 60. With a lot of cards, the line to what it can and can’t handle is a little blurry when it comes to resolutions. But for the Pulse 6500 XT it is a hard line, 1080p = good, anything higher = bad.

Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below. What I was mostly focused on was how the Pulse 6500 XT would compare between the RTX 3050, RX 5500 XT, and the older GTX 1650. To check that out I did put all of the numbers together and averaged them out. What we can see is that at 1080p the 6500 XT and the older 5500 XT are similar in performance, the 3050 is up in its own classification though. But what is interesting is that at 1440p and 4K the 5500 XT is much faster. This might be the first time that I’ve seen a next generation of a card dropped in performance like that. Neither card is ideal for 4k and 1440p, but it's clear that the 5500 XT is a lot more flexible when it comes to that due to the PCI bandwidth limitations of the 6500 XT.

Compute Benchmarks

Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases people who game also do work on the side. So it is also important to check out the compute performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests. My first test was a simple GPU Compute benchmark using Passmark’s Performance Test 10 and the Pulse 6500 XT came in with a 5422 score which was way out in front of the 5500 XT but with a big gap between it and the GTX 1070 which is the next card up.

Blender is always my favorite compute benchmark because the open-source 3D rendering software is very popular and it isn’t a synthetic benchmark. Here I render all six scenes and combine the total time it takes in seconds using the provided Blender Benchmark on the 2.93.1 build. The Pulse 6500 XT is not the card to be rendering in Blender. To do the full six renders, the Pulse 6500 XT took a total of 6138 seconds or 102 minutes, a half longer than it took for the GTX 1650 even.

Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage. For this, I use our Kill-A-Watt hooked up to the test bench to record the total wattage of the system. I ran two tests with the first using 3DMark Time Spy to put the system under a load similar to normal in game performance. Here our test system with the Pulse 6500 XT pulled a total of 220 watts putting it down at the bottom of all of the cards tested with only the GTX 1650 below it. At the same time with Time Spy I also use GPUz to check out the onboard reading for GPU power draw at the chip. The Pulse 6500 XT, even with its overclock was registering 91 watts even, for comparison the 5500 XT ran at 132 watts. Lastly, I run AIDA64’s stress test on the video card to load up only the GPU, and using the Kill-A-Watt the test bench with the Pulse 6500 XT came in at 202 watts, the AIDA 64 workload had the 1650 and 5500 XT both below the Pulse 6500 XT but just a few watts off.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. I test using both A and C weighting, A is the standard way and C has a little more of the low end to check for low-level hums. The Pulse 6500 XT was a lot louder than I expected in the 50% fan speed test when doing the standard A weight. The card did better when adding in the lower frequencies with the C weighting but was still in the middle of the pack there. The Pulse 6500 XT was up in the same range when I cranked up the fan speed up to 100% with it coming in at 61.8 decibels with the A-weighting. This put it in the middle of all of the dual fan reference/founders edition cards and not down with most of the aftermarket cards. I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the Pulse 6500 XT did much better, running right with the PowerColor 5500 XT.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up. Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the Pulse 6500 XT leveled off at 57c. This was 3 degrees higher than our 5500 XT and 5 above the EVGA stock clocked RTX 3050. Overall this is running cool, but given how much quieter the Pulse 6500 XT was in my noise testing on the stock fan profile than with the 50% or 100% fan tests their fan profile seems to be more focused on keeping things quiet. I don’t think that is a bad choice either. Then with the fans cranked up, the Pulse 6500 XT ran cooler at 48c but here it moved up in the chart a little. I suspect the horizontal heatsink layout plays a role here, like I said previously those cooler designs always run a little warmer from what I’ve seen. Even still, the Pulse 6500 XT isn’t exactly running hot. But the delta between the two tests shows that most cards have a wider gap between results.

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. With the fan side thermal image on the Pulse 6500 XT, it is clear that the left side is handling more heat load and having a harder time cooling things down. The right side does have easier airflow with the blow-through section on the PCB and backplate which helps. But the left side has the same heat from the GPU as well as all of the VRMs on that side. The top view shows there isn’t too much air blowing out of the top or bottom of the card and that the horizontal layout is doing its job pushing the air towards the two ends of the card. Then on the back the exposed back of the GPU mounting location is obviously the hottest spot on the card. There is some thermal transfer to the metal backplate with the bottom half of the backplate running a little warmer. We can also see the blow-through section is doing just that on the far end of the card.

Overall and Final Verdict

This time around with this being the second Sapphire card we have had in the office recently I was excited to not only check out what the RX 6500 XT is all about, but to see what Sapphires Pulse line of cards is about as well. The Sapphire Pulse RX 6500 XT is far from what I saw in their Nitro+ lineup, our Pulse 6500 XT did have an overclock, but it was a very small overclock. But the biggest difference (without getting into pricing) you will find is that the Pulse is a much more compact card. The Pulse 6500 XT mostly fits in the “traditional” PCI dimensions with it only sticking up just slightly past the top of the bracket and being a true 2 slot card where most other cards these days have been pushing the limits on sizing. The more compact design is nice to have and means it is also not going to have trouble fitting in any case that can support a 2 slot card.

Sapphire card design kept things very simple with a black plastic fan shroud and a dual-fan design. They did use a surprising amount of red accents which starts to feel old school going back to before RGB was on everything and when anything “gaming” had to use red for some reason. They didn’t go too crazy with it, but if you are looking for an all blacked out design this isn’t going to be the one. I personally prefer the all blacked out look and I don’t mind at all that there isn’t any lighting on here. If anything not having RGB could be a feature. But the best part about the aesthetics has to be that they included a metal backplate. Most cards that are focused on hitting a decent price point, especially on lower-end GPUs skip out on them including the EVGA RTX 3050 that I took a look at last week. So having one here is huge and it being metal not a basic plastic design like some cards will have is great.

As for performance, like I said at the start of the review. The RX 6500 XT has been surrounded by drama about design decisions that AMD went with. Those don’t have anything to do with Sapphire specifically, but in my testing, it was obvious that the PCI 4.0 x4 interface that the 6500 XT sets a hard cap on the bandwidth available which shows itself the most at 1440p and 4k but you can also see it from time to time at 1080p when you have the detail turned up. Specifically, you can see the older last generation 5500 XT outperform the newer card in some of those situations. Our 5500 XT also had more VRAM as well which also plays a role with it sitting at 8GB and the 6500 XT at 4GB. It also struggled when doing our bender rendering tests more than any other card tested. All of that said, I don’t think you should completely discount the RX 6500 XT because of that. You just need to know how you plan on using the card, if you are gaming at 1080p or lower and don’t see that changing for a long time. This is still an option. In a prepandemic world I would be much harsher on this, but right now given how even the used card market hasn’t been able to get enough cards if the 6500 XT can potentially take even some of that load off I’m not against it.

As for Sapphire's side of performance. The Pulse 6500 XT hits the mark in some areas but struggles in a few others. For noise performance, the card didn’t do too bad when under load and frankly this is the most important metric. But if you plan on cranking the fan speed up, it was louder than some other cards. The cooling performance was similar, with the stock fan profile it wasn’t the coolest card test but it isn’t too bad. But cranking the fan up didn’t cool things down significantly. I attribute this to a horizontal layout on the heatsink fins which in our past testing has done similar things for cooling and fan noise on other cards. But that layout also means more air is pushed to the ends of the card, not down against your motherboard. So there are a few benefits.

Moving back to pricing, this is always a moving target so I want to talk about the MSRP of the Pulse 6500 XT and also address what it is currently selling for as well. Due to getting to this card after launch, we end up in a weird place where most cards have sold out with the exception of marked-up resellers. So the MSRP of the Pulse 6500 XT from what I was told by Sapphire is $199 bucks and at that price and in this current market that isn’t a bad price at all. It does hurt when we look back at the launch pricing of the 5500 XT which was $169 and almost 6 years ago the RX 480 4GB was also launching at $199. But shortages have driven pricing up or in this case, a similar card (other than the PCIe lane limits) to the 480 is launching for the same price 6 years later. But something to consider, those same 6 year old RX 480’s are selling for over $300 USED. Now the Pulse 6500 XT right now after the launch can only be found for $299, which is a crazy markup. Sadly this isn’t on Sapphire, it is just random resellers on Newegg and Amazon.

Overall I do like what Sapphire has going on with the Pulse 6500 XT even though there are a few areas that could use improvement. As a budget-focused card, you are getting a small overclock and the performance should be reliable. The overall issues with the RX 6500 XT should have you evaluating how you plan on using the card over the next few years. If esports gaming at 1080p is your goal, there isn’t anything here stopping you. Really any 1080p gaming will be good. But with newer titles the bandwidth and VRAM issues will start to show themselves more in the future if you try running at the highest detail levels and I wouldn’t recommend 1440p or 4K.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.