Although AMD's RX Vega lineup didn't exactly tear up the graphics card game in the way its Zen processors did, it did at least give it a credible competitor for Nvidia's top-end cards -- albeit if miners wouldn't keep buying them all. They must be selling well enough to gamers though, as Sapphire has announced a new addition to its offerings, called the Pulse Radeon RX Vega 56, which improves the clock speed, uprates the cooling and adds a new radiator shroud design.
The Pulse Line of Sapphire cards are typically cheaper than its top-tier Nitro+ range, but that doesn't mean they aren't powerful and certainly better in most respects than the reference designs. This one features 3,584 stream processors overclocked to 1,512MHz and has 8GB of HBM2 memory with an 800MHz clock speed. If all of that is too much power for day to day operation too, there's a hardware switch you can flick on the card which helps reduce power requirements for added efficiency, though performance will suffer -- as per Hexus.
Cooling on this card has been uprated too, with a huge heatsink design that effectively makes this card as long as some of the GDDR5 counterparts. Though the PCB itself is more akin to AMD's Fury range of graphics cards, the shroud practically doubles the length and comes with a large aluminum heatsink underneath and a dual fan design for more efficient and quiet cooling.
Set to go on sale on February 12, pricing information for this card has yet to be released.
