AMD Radeon RX 7600 Review Featuring the Sapphire PULSE

A mainstream 1080p graphics card with a more sensible price

It’s been six months, and we finally have another member in the Radeon RX 7000 Series family. But with the RX 6800 and RX 6900 Series cards still in the retail pipeline, it makes sense that AMD is going for a lower-end card here (even if I’d love it if this was an RX 7800 review).

Today we have AMD’s RX 7600, with no “XT”, and it has 8GB of VRAM. That’s it. Review over. 8GB of VRAM in 2023?! If the fallout from the RTX 4060 Ti launch is any indication, that makes a product “DOA”, but this is a much less expensive product, so give it a fair shake.

Maybe 8GB may not make you an enthusiast – AMD’s words, not mine – but it will allow you to play games at 1080p, which is still the most common display resolution even though enthusiasts are predominantly on 1440 and up.

Anyway, the company that said you need 16GB has released an 8GB card, but they are correctly positioning this as a mainstream 1080p option. It is priced pretty competitively by modern standards at $269 USD (we all thought it would be $299, but there was a last-minute change).

Let’s have a look at this very incomplete-looking table of RX 7000 Series GPUs:

The Radeon RX 7600 is being directly compared to the RX 6600 (from 2021) by AMD, which was also an 8GB card. The GDDR6 has an effective data rate of 18 Gbps, up from 14 Gbps with the RX 6600, with both on a 128-bit bus. The RX 7600 offers four additional Compute Units compared to the RX 6600, with a CU count of 32 (up from 28), and Stream Processor count of 2048 (up from 1792).

It’s also an 8-lane card (like the NVIDIA card that just launched), if that upsets you for some reason. The RX 6600 was an 8-lane GPU as well, and we all fondly remember the 4-lane RX 6500 XT. Don’t we?

The Sapphire PULSE Card

Sapphire doesn’t appear to have made any changes to the PULSE design from last generation, as this remains an understated, functional offering (and devoid of RGB).

Some Benchmark Results

Since I knew going into this review that the RX 7600 was targeting 1080p gaming, I chose 1920×1080 / high as the benchmark standard. After looking at the results I could have pushed this up to 1080/Ultra in most cases, and some would easily go up to at least 1440/High. Alas, there are just the 1080/High results below.

I’ll pause the charts here for a moment to mention that Far Cry 6 was tested with the HD textures enabled intentionally. I bought the game specifically to test this VRAM problem I keep hearing about, and of course it’s an issue. If the 1% lows are not obvious enough, just try running the benchmark on an 8GB card for yourself. It will almost pause at times. Not exactly “micro” stutter…

There isn’t a lot of variance in the ranking of the GPUs on these four charts, with the PULSE RX 7600 offering performance a bit behind the RTX 3060 Ti unless it’s an AMD-optimized title like Far Cry 6 (again, you probably shouldn’t be using HD textures with an 8GB or lower card), and ahead of the RX 6600 XT. I don’t have a RX 6700 non-XT on hand to test, but I bet it would be close to the RX 7600.

Next we’ll check out the power draw with this Sapphire card:

Total power draw is a bit higher than the listed 165 watts, with 180+ watts of total board power (PCIe and slot power combined) observed during a 3DMark run. Not bad, but AMD does not have the efficiency one might expect given the process tech and the very small size of this GPU. They are obviously pushing frequencies pretty far with these.

As to thermals with this PULSE card, after my usual ten consecutive runs of Metro Exodus (1080/Extreme in this instance) I saw a max of 67 C GPU, and 81 C Hot Spot in a 20 C room, with the fans topping out at 39% (1949 RPM) according to GPU-Z logging. It’s very quiet, too, but I didn’t do noise testing as I’m not controlling CPU cooler noise on this testbed (I run the cooler at 100%; need a passive setup for noise testing).

Final Thoughts

All in all the Radeon RX 7600 is a meaningful replacement for the RX 6600, and exceeds the performance level of the RX 6600 XT. That doesn’t make it a super exciting product, but it’s better than I expected. Or maybe a certain very recent GPU just makes this look better. I’m not sure.

Cards targeting 1080p are mainstream products, as enthusiasts run higher resolutions for the most part (I think this is a pretty safe assumption). Enthusiasts buy enthusiast products, and your PC gamer who just wants to play the latest titles on a 1080p monitor will be very well served with a mainstream GPU option like this. And maybe even more (I still want to re-test at 1440/High, but I’m worried about VRAM in newer titles).

As to value, the base price of the Radeon RX 7600, which is $269 USD, is not bad. I struggle with pricing these days, and ultimately people vote with their wallets. I know it wasn’t that long ago that the Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 cards were the $200 (and often less) 8GB 1080p juggernauts, but things are different now.

As to this particular Sapphire card, all I need to say is that it’s a PULSE card. Sapphire have set a high bar for quality and performance at the entry level, and I always recommend Sapphire if you are looking at a Radeon GPU (NOT sponsored/affiliated, just speaking from experience).