Introduction

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse OC is the company’s close-to-reference custom design rendition of the newly launched AMD Radeon RX 7600. The Pulse series of graphics cards by Sapphire represent the value end of the company’s custom-design series, and is designed for those who just want an RX 7600 graphics card that they can install and forget about. Sapphire still puts in work to make its Pulse series some of the quietest custom-designs out there. The AMD Radeon RX 7600 represents an unexpected jump by AMD from the enthusiast-segment RX 7900 series, down to the mid-range, with no performance-segment RX 7700-series or RX 7800-series launches along the way. The RX 7600 comes with all of the latest technologies the company has introduced with its latest RDNA3 generation.

The Radeon RX 7600 is based on AMD’s latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, although the silicon itself is based on the slightly older 6 nm foundry node, not the latest 5 nm. AMD probably thinks it can pull off a mid-range GPU from this generation on the older node with minimal performance/Watt losses compared to the competition, which comes from NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060 series. The RDNA3 graphics architecture debuts a completely redesigned dual-compute unit (CU), with dual issue-rate SIMD machinery that supports new math formats; the company’s second-generation Ray Accelerator that offers a 50% increase in ray intersection performance over RDNA2, and the new AI Accelerators, which speed up matrix multiplication and other forms of math relevant to AI deep-learning neural net building and training (essentially AMD’s version of a Tensor core).

The RX 7600 maxes out the “Navi 33” silicon it is based on, enabling all 32 RDNA3 compute units physically present, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. Just like the shader counts, the memory sub-system is unchanged from the previous generation, albeit generationally improved. The RX 7600 enjoys 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. This runs at higher 18 Gbps speeds, and the company is using second-generation Infinity Cache, a 32 MB last-level cache on the GPU that speeds up the memory sub-system. The RX 7600 also gets AMD Radiance Display Engine, which offers support for the latest DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1 connector standards, while the RDNA3 media engine offers dual simultaneous media encode streams.

The Sapphire RX 7600 Pulse OC features a simple aluminium fin-stack cooler with a fan profile that prioritizes low noise, and a PCB that’s very close to the AMD reference design. The card is meant to be compact and highly compatible across most gaming PC case types. Power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Sapphire offers a tiny factory-overclock with this card, which sees the Game clock set at 2356 MHz, compared to 2250 MHz AMD reference. The memory is untouched at 18 Gbps. Sapphire has decided to price the RX 7600 Pulse OC at the AMD MSRP of $269.