Final Thoughts
The PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT is an excellent entry in the Sapphire family. It can perform a bit better than a reference card thanks to higher clock speeds and board power, and it is really, really quiet. In fact, though Sapphire offers a NITRO+ variant, I think this PULSE version hits a sweet spot – but you will need to move up to the NITRO+ if you require RGB.
The only area in which our AMD reference card performed better was actually thermals, but this is due to the reference card’s aggressive fan profile vs. the very conservative fan profile that our Sapphire sample shipped with. If you are willing to trade a bit of noise for lower temps, a simple fan curve adjustment (easily done in software) places this right up there with the AMD card.
As to value, as of this writing the PULSE RX 7900 XT was listed for $849 USD after rebate (Newegg link), which is $50 lower than AMD’s original launch price for the GPU, but $50 higher than the $799 you can find a reference card for these days. You will have to decide if the higher clocks and lower noise are worth the difference, but I would personally choose this card unless the smaller dimensions of a reference design are required for your build.