Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 XT
20 GB RDNA3 card bought from a friend to replace my RTX 3070, runs heavy games on high and stays cool
| Maker | Sapphire |
|---|---|
| Model | Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XT |
| Type | Graphics card (AMD Navi 31, RDNA3, 20 GB) |
Store
| Store | Price | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Owned | — | 2026-09-27 |
Description
This is the graphics card inside my Gaming PC, the part that does the heavy lifting when I'm playing something. It's an AMD card, on Linux that's the best option because I don't need to manually compile the drivers again anymore.
I bought it right after my previous card, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 that I brought over from Brazil and that was getting obsolete over time. A friend of mine was moving to a newer AMD card, so I bought his.
This is my first AMD card since I was a kid. I remember AMD had an update tool called Catalyst that was horrible to use, and after that I never bought anything from them again, I always thought it was rubbish. The only AMD things I kept buying were processors, and for graphics I stayed on NVIDIA. Then the whole AI thing happened, NVIDIA cards got much more expensive than AMD ones for roughly the same benefit, and I decided to buy this.
Impressions
It's a great card and quite resistant. It works very well for a lot of things, and I've run practically every game I needed to run on it, including some pretty heavy ones on high settings.
It's one of the few cards with 20 GB of VRAM, which most cards don't have these days, so I can also use it to run local LLM models. It's bad at that, still very slow, but it does give me something extra.
The only bad part is that it's relatively big and heavy, so you always need a support bracket to keep it up, otherwise it sags and twists. It has two HDMI outputs and two DisplayPorts if I'm not mistaken. I only use the DisplayPorts, but the HDMI outputs are very good too.
It doesn't heat up as much as the other card I had, so even running super heavy games it stays cool. It also overclocks nicely. Every card does, but this one works very well with a small overclock on top of it.