Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX550 4GB 11268-01-20G Video Card Review

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A time comes when you need a video card, upgrading from on chip/die/bcrooard GPU, upgrading your existing video card or maybe replacing and existing video that might have died, the time comes for us all. The type of GPU/Video card you buy can depend on a few things like your budget, preference or functionality and I might have something that might fit on a few of those lists. Today I bring you my review of the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX550 11268-01-20G video card.

This is a budget video card from our friends at Sapphire based off AMD’s latest GPU series still on the Polaris line, though refined and evolved as AMD states. So let’s check out the features and specifications.

Specifications and Features

Engine Clock: 1175Mhz
- Boost Engine Clock: 1206 (Seems to always run at this speed though)
4096MB GDDR5 128-bit RAM
- 1750Mhz
  - 7000Mhz Effective Memory Frequency
- Compute Shaders: 512
- 3 Output Maximum
  - 1 x DVI-D
  - 1 x HDMI 2.0b
  - 1 x Display Port 1.4
- Resolutions Supported
  - DVD-D
    - 2560 x 1600 (60Hz)
  - HDMI 2.0b
    - 3840 x 2160p (60Hz)
  - Display Port
    - 3840 x 2160 (120Hz)
  - Supported API’s:
    - OpenGL 4.5
    - OpenCL 2.0
    - DirectX 12
    - Shader Model 5.0
    - Vulkan API
  - Supported Features
    - FreeSync Technology
    - AMD Eyefinity
    - AMD Xconnect Ready
    - DirectX 12 Optimized
    - HDR Ready
    - Frame Rate Target Control
    - Intelligent Fan Control III
    - Radeon Chill
    - Radeon Relive
  - Power Consumption: 65Watts
  - System Requirements
    - 400Watt Power Supply
    - Windows 10, 8.1, 8 or 7
  - Form Factor
- Length: 6.22in
- Width: 4.41in
- Depth: 1.10in

OK, before we talk anymore on the card, let’s check out an unboxing.

Before we get to the card, let’s check out what comes inside of the box.

This Quick Installation Guide shows you basics on how to install the card, though I will a little later on in this review have a video showing you how to install it.

In this pamphlet, we have the production registration card. Unlike most product registration cards, this actually has the serial number of your card already pasted in there so if something happens, you don’t have to take the card out to look for it.

This sheet gives you manufacturer information.

Lastly, the drivers disc. I only recommend using this if you do not have an internet connection or maybe a very slow one if you are excited to jump into it. I state this because the minute this disk is printed, the drivers are outdated, and the updates greatly improve performances and gameplay within games.

And here is the card itself. It is a tiny little thing, only 6.22 inches long, but don’t worry it’s not about the size of the card but how you use it.

Here we can see the outputs, 1 x Display Port (DP), 1 x HDMI and 1 x DVI. There are no VGA ports which may not be a bad thing for many, and it also does not bring an adapter.

If you do need an adapter, you can click on the adapter pictured above and it will take you to Amazon’s site where you can get one.

Now let’s get to discovering the card a little more

Coming around to the right, we can see the front of the card (even though it is the side). While the card does have a plastic housing, it is almost completely opened on the side so it will be expelling all of the heat into the case. Mostly if you have a system that has remotely decent cooling, you will be fine with this. You can see the SAPPHIRE logo on the bottom right hand corner, and just above that the 4 PIN connection that powers the GPU fan.

Around the back of the card, we can see there is no additional power connector. There is no 6Pin or 8Pin connector, so that means it is using the PCI-e slots power, all 75Watts. Well, not completely true, while the PCIe slot does provide 75Watts, the card only utilizes 65Watts which is why it only requires a 400Watt power supply, the rest of for your entire system.

The rear of the card, like the side is also opened up to allow heat to expel from the rear.

A little more to the right, we find the PCIe connection.

We can also see this side is also exposed. So the card expels heat from all sides of the card.

Around the front of the card, where you plug in the monitors, you can see highlighted in red that this also expels heat, so there is no real pressure but it may not be needed. The fact that it does not build pressure also helps to achieve Sapphires Cool & Quiet technology but we don’t know just yet how cool and quiet it really is, but we will see soon.

Also to note, even though this is a single height card at least on the PCI slot side, it actually takes up a little of the second slot, so it essence it is a dual height card.

On the back of the card, we can see that there is no cover here, it is a plain PCB. The PULSE line of Sapphire is not meant to be sexy, it is a no frills video card and that helps in the card coming in at such a low price. Does no frills though mean it’s a bad card, that it can’t perform well. We will also find out a little later in the review.

Before we get onto the performance though, let’s see how to install it. This next page will show you how to do so.

[nextpage title=”Installing the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX550 4GB”]

Every single one of us at one point, did not know how to install a video card, so we have all been noobs at some point and that is OK. In this video I will show you just how to install the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX550 4GB video card which will save you some money, help provide a little more confidence and maybe even make you some money as well.

Please remember to uninstall the older drivers, whatever they may have been before you install the new card. If you don’t, don’t worry your computer wont die but it could be a little more difficult though not impossible to get the newer drivers installed.

So let’s get to installing the video card.

So here is the final product, the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX5500 4GB card installed, pretty simple, right? Now after the card has been installed, remember to download and install the latest video drivers.

Now that we have the card installed and the latest drivers installed, let’s go ahead and check out the performance of the card.

[nextpage title=”Benchmarks, Performance, Temperatures and Power Consumption”]

OK, so that you have a reference point, check out my system specifications.

Aside from the specifications I provided earlier, here are the GPU-Z readings on the card.

Here is much of the same from Sapphires own utility TRIXX.

I will utilize this program a little later to unlock some extra performance a little later in the review, so stay tuned. You can grab a copy of Sapphire’s TRIXX 3.0 here: http://www.sapphiretech.com/catapage_tech.asp?cataid=291&lang=eng

You can see that the Sapphire Radeon PULSE RX550 4GB is based off of the Lexa chipset, part of the Polaris line.

Before I get started with the benchmark, I wanted to show you how my testing process goes. First off, during all of my benchmarks, I capture the power consumption of the entire system. For these tests I capture the minimum power used, average power used and the maximum power consumed. To get all of these readings, I use “Kill A Watt” by “P3 International“.

I use the following applications to benchmark

OK, let’s get started benchmarking

Now, I did mention early on that this is a budget GPU, but it still does relatively well under the “Gaming PC” section of the Run Details. Sadly, the card has not yet been entered into FutureMark’s database, so I entered it myself, but I guess it takes a while to register.

During this test, the lowest amount of power consumed by the PC was 71.1 Watts, that is amazingly low, for an entire PC with the specs listed previously, I am very surprised honestly. The hottest the video card got in this test was 54°C.

Part of the 3DMark Suite, let’s see what TimeSpy says.

Well, not really high but again, think budget here. How does it compare to other results?

Performing better than 7% of all other results. TimeSpy heated up the card to 68°C at an average of 105 Watts consumed. Keep in mind, 3DMark and TimeSpy are only benchmarks, not games, so let’s check out this card performs in games.

For the rest of benchmarks, I have adjusted the settings a little different than I usually do for the higher end video cards. I will use this benchmarking method for all budget video cards moving forward and of course I will be listing below all the settings I have made. For performance cards, I would use ULTRA settings, for budget PC’s I will use Medium/Normal settings which might be a little more realistic for more people.

So now let’s get on to Metro Last Light.

Here are my presets for Metro Last Light. The only thing I will change for each test is the resolution and each test will be run in 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2650×1440 and presenting you with the results, power consumption and temperatures.

For a budget GPU, this really does amazingly well at 1080P, 14.26% above the almighty 60FPS and best of all at normal settings. At 6850 x 1050, the FPS count was very high at 78.73FPS and I have that in there just in case you don’t have a 1080P monitor, but know that you can turn up the eye candy just a tiny bit more. At 2K though, it was a bit rough at 42.87FPS though kept on par with the 1080P’s thermals at 74°C and only slight higher power consumption at 138Watts over 1080Ps 131Watts. The sweet spot here is 1080P, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I am a bit surprised how well this card handled Metro, again with the newer settings, but now let’s see how Thief handles.

Here are the settings I used throughout the benchmark, only changing the resolution in between.

It looks like Thief is having no part of this card, chugging a bit even at 1680 x 1050 coming in at 52.2 frames per second at a chilly 67°C. Bumping up the resolution somewhat at 1920 x 1080 we drop down to 42.5 FPS, performance dropping by 18.58% though the wattage did drop 9.15% which is always welcoming.

In Thief, the “Normal” preset leaves some things on High and Default and leaves Tessellation enabled, which would explain the performance degradation but I don’t want to change the presets. The only thing I do change on presets is the disable v-sync.

Well, I hope Laura can help a little here.

The settings look very similar to that of Thief, but the normal preset is a bit different, but let’s see what the results tell us.

Wow, Laura took the power back here, stole it out of Garret’s hands, see what I did there? So at 1920 x 1080, we see an Average FPS of 84.3, 12.19% lower than that of 1680 x 1050 performance, and at a 1.63% decrease in power consumption oddly enough and the temperature dropped by 4 degrees. At 50.5 FPS on 2560 x 1440, it was almost at the magic number… what can we do to make that score improve? I will get to that in a little bit, but let’s make a pit stop over to New York in “Tom Clancy’s” “The Division”.

Here are the newer presets

The only thing I changed from the Medium default was to disable V-sync, just in case it does pass 60 frames per second. So let’s see the results.

Well, it doesn’t look like this card is cut for The Division, though I had high hopes for it. At 1080P, we can see the average FPS is 34.3, a 12.72% decrease from the FPS on 1680 x 1050 which was 39.3 FPS. 1080P did come in 1 degree cooler and consumed 5 Watts less on average. At 2560 x 1440 though, it was very choppy coming in at 21 FPS, that’s a 38.76% decrease from 1080P’s and came in consuming 10 Watts more as well.

I will work on getting this to run better with those settings I have listed above, but let’s see how the card runs on a few other popular games. Those games are League of Legends, Quake Champions, Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Paragon. Check out the next page.

[nextpage title=”Gameplay and Performance”]

This is the time I look forward to in all of my reviews,… taking a break and kicking it back to a few games. As I mentioned before, the games I will be playing are League of Legends, Quake Champions, Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Paragon.

So let’s start off with Quake Champions:

Quake Champions

That game actually performed amazingly well, though the graphics were turned down a bit it still looked nice. I remember the days of playing Quake I and Quake II on my Creative Savage 4 and then my Geforce 3 TI 550, and surely some more,… but that was too long ago. Anyway, let’s checkout Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

This is an older game, but I was able to play at 2560 x 1440 at over 60 frames per second, and on high too. It was a bit smoother at 1920 x 1080, but still I was over 60 FPS on 2K. So now let’s check out League of Legends.

League of Legends

Wow, 4K gaming at very high and she was getting above 80 frames per second, in the upper 90’s as well. League of Legends is a pretty fun game too. Let’s check out Paragon now.

Paragon

At 1920 x 1080 the card was seeing over 60 frames per second, though with the settings on low. If you are playing an online competition, or are just a serious online game, you will always configuring your settings very low anyway, so this works out perfectly.

The problem with recording is that the framerate will drop a bit while recording, usually between 10 and 30 frames per second, on this card I only experience about a 5 frame per second drop. Thankfully that is relatively low, but still it can mean anyway between under 60 FPS and below.

The program I used for this was Action Screen Recording software and the hardware acceleration used on these tests under Action! was AMD APP.

Sadly, this is always a very short session but now I was talking about eeking a little better performance out of the cards, and I will. In this next chapter I will be overclocking the card some and the performance improvement is very surprising.

[nextpage title=”Overclocking Performance, Benchmarks, Temperatures and Power Consumption”]

When I first got this card, I was thinking that this was going to be such a boring review because well, it shouldn’t be able to do much right? I mean, it has not been horrible, but can it get better?

Turns out this card is an overclockers dream, it can overclock incredibly high and I went kind of high, but I did not want to spent too much time on it. Check out my overclock below.

You can see here that I have overclocked the GPU by 164Mhz and the memory by 70Mhz. Now a byproduct of overclocking the GPU and the memory is that the Pixel Fillrate increase by 2.6GigaPixels, 5.2GigaTexels and the memory bandwidth improved by 4.2GigaBytes per second. How did I achieve this, well I am not telling! Haha, no I am just kidding.

To overclock the card, I used Sapphires own TRIXX. Here are the default settings

And now the overclock

This was one of the easiest overclocks and most effective I have done in quite sometime, I am by no means a professional overclocker, though I am pretty good at it. So what I did here was I raised the GPU Clock by 10Mhz at a time until I hit the comfortable 1370, raising the “Power Limit” settings to 51% (I know it is higher here and I will get to that in a sec). I could have gone higher but I did not want to waste too much time on this.

After that, I raised the memory clock a bit, each time on both while I tested, running a pass of TimeSpy and Metro Last Light until everything was perfect. By perfect, I mean no artifacting and no crashing. The heat, this time I left to automatic and it took care of itself nicely.

Now back to the 51% versus the 55% Power Limit setting you see there. At 51%, everything was working fine, until I started recording the results. I got through 3DMark and TimeSpy with no issues, and the 1680 x 1050 in Metro Last Light but when I got to 1920 x 1080, it would freeze. I knew it could only be the Power limit, so I raised it 1 point each time testing afterwards until I reached 55% and everything worked fine. This of course meant I had to go back and retest everything, so here are my results.

A very nice improvement in performance here receiving 4,242 whereas before we got a score of 3,865, an increase of 8.89%. We also went up a few rankings now receiving 22% above all other results whereas before we only saw 15%, a 38.82% bump in results.

Since there was an increase in performance, as we can expect our average power consumption went up to 136 Watts where before we saw 113 Watts on average. This was a 16.91% increase in power usage and with that the temperature went up to 70°C up from the stock 67°C, a temperature increase of 4.29%, but the fans were still set to automatic.

Now the total score is not the only thing that went up, so let’s do some more comparison and break down how that score came to be.

Across the board here on 3DMark, we can see improvements. The graphics score went up 9.66%, Physics score went up a measly 1.63% and lastly the Combined score went up 8.05%.

Let’s see how TimeSpy reacts to this bump.

From the stocks 1,379 we get the overclocks 1,518, a 9.16% increase. With that increase came an increase in thermals from 68°C up to 72°C, a 5.56% bump in power, not bad for extra performance. With that came and average increase in power usage from 113 Watts to 149 Watts a rather large increase of 24.16%.

That increase though did nothing for the rankings, but I was impressed. So let’s check out the complete comparison to see how the total score was formed.

Yet again we can see a complete improvement in the results. On the graphics score we can see a 9.53% increase in performance and in the CPU score, even though we did not overclock the CPU at all, we can see a tiny but mention worthy 0.22% increase.

On the bad side, there was a 4 degree increase in thermals and a 24.16% increase in power utilization, but it is to be expected. The card now is working a bit harder, so it is understood that thermals and power consumption have gone up, though we could have lowered the heat by raising the fan speed, but they are still low enough, so I did not want to raise the noise level.

Let’s check to see if the results are as positive in games,… you know where they mater.

For the games, we are going to break the results sections by resolutions to make it a lot easier to read. We will start off with 1680 x 1050.

1680 x 1050

We are off to a good start here. On average, the overclock performed 8.01% higher with the same temperature, the fan does a real good job here. On the negative but to be expected side, we can see there was a 18.47% increase in power usage on average. The results prior to overclocking were already great, but let’s see what 1920 x 1080 will tell us.

1920 x 1080

Yet again, the overclock is working in our favor, as it should of course with a few things to point out. Oddly enough, it seems the minimum and maximum frame rate dropped from 38.74 to 14.34, a 62.98% decrease and dropped 20.56% on the Max frame rate from 196.23 to 155.88 FPS. While these are odd, it seems that maybe the overclock keep things a little more under control as those FPS’ were already extreme, but more importantly it raised the average frame rate from 69.98 to 74.75 FPS, a 6.38% increase. I myself don’t really care what the max frame rate is, though the minimum can be a little scary at times because that means at any point in the game, it can hit that minimum FPS, and 14.34 is totally unplayable but it’s usually a quick blip.

So let’s check out 2560 x 1440.

2560 x 1440

So I have to say, I was let down here. I was kind of thinking it would raise the frame rate from 42.87 to somewhere in the 60’s but the frame rate only rose 6.36% to 45.78, still an improvement but not what I was hoping for. Regardless on that, we notice that the average power consumption went from 138 Watts to 156Watts an 11.54% increase. Even though the score only went up about 3 frames per second, it’s still an increase and the thermals stayed the same.

So in Metro Last Light, we did see some improvements, nothing huge, but sometimes all you need is a tiny bump to make something playable. So now let’s move on to Thief in which we did have a few problems with, let’s see if it helped out.

1680 x 1050

You know, and I was going to stop using Thief, but it looks like its kicking this cards butt. On the stock settings, the game was on the cusp of being playable at 52.2 (I would still play it like that) but the overclock actually made the game drop a frame per second, down to 51 frames per second. I mean, 1 frame per second is nothing really but still I would have expected some improvement. The electric company would be happy being that it now consumes 8.39% more power on average and actually got 6 degrees warmer as well. Let’s see what 1920 x 1080 will do for us.

1920 x 1080

Well, it looks like the performance on Thief did not improve much here, but there has been some improvement at least. We can see on average we received 46.7 frames per second a 8.99% increase in performance and the heat did no go up at all, though the wattage increased by 16.23% from 129 Watts consumed on average to 154 Watts. Thief is really stealing performance here, I don’t know if we can expect any better, but let’s check on 25