Overall and Final Verdict
Even before getting into testing, I had high expectations for the Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse. The previous 9070 XT Steel Legion that I took a look at was good but Sapphire has always done a great job of being a step ahead and we see that here with the RX 9070 XT Pulse. Like we have seen with past Pulse cards, the RX 9070 XT Pulse keeps things very simple with a focus on performance and no flashy aesthetics like RGB lighting. That said, the basic black cooler design looks good and gets the job done without being too flashy. While having the same stock clock speed, it stood out in a majority of our tests sometimes with more of a lead than we would see with an overclocked card. Sapphire did that with impressive cooling performance with the only exception to that being memory temps a little warmer than I would like to see. But still better than the memory temps on the Steel Legion. Even with the cooling performance, it was also impressive in our noise testing across the board. The RX 9070 XT GPU was once again impressive with its raster performance. AMD has come a long way with AI and Ray Tracing performance as well, but that is the one area where we see Nvidia cards still leading the way.
It's impressive that Sapphire did so well with the RX 9070 XT Pulse even at stock clock speeds and with that this is technically an “MSRP” card with its MSRP being $599. Of course, we all know that video card pricing right now has been crazy across the board, and finding them at MSRP is basically impossible. In the case of the Pulse, they are at Newegg and Micro Center for $849.99. You can at least currently get the Steel Legend and a few other cards closer to the $700 range and that would be the only reason to not be looking at the Pulse when shopping for an RX 9070 XT.
Live Pricing: HERE
