As expected for a factory-overclocked card the PULSE does draw a bit more power at both idle and load than the reference card. Performance, as we have seen and then discussed at length, disagrees with this chart, but it is what it is. Even if I’m not very happy about it.

Next up we will talk temps, though there isn’t much to say here. With the room at approximately the same ambient temp as our initial Radeon RX 5700 XT review (25C – 26C for both cards) we saw load temps with AMD’s blower cooler hitting 76C with a 94C hot spot in our admittedly not-so-punishing test, with the SAPPHIRE PULSE a couple of degrees below this at 74C/92C hot spot.

Noise levels, on the other hand, were drastically lower with the PULSE card compared to the reference design, with load noise of just 38.3 dBA from the SAPPHIRE card compared to 48.6 dBA from the reference card. SAPPHIRE’s conservative default fan profile might keeping the PULSE from hitting more impressive temps than we saw, but it’s impressive nonetheless that temps are still lower than reference with a card that barely audible under load over average room noise.