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
