Sapphire Radeon RX 590 8GB Nitro+ Polaris Refresh Leaks With Custom Design

Brace yourself, Radeon RX 590 graphics cards are coming. There is zero doubt about that at this point, even though AMD's upcoming Polaris refresh is still not official. It will be soon, and in the meantime, we're seeing more and more related leaks. The latest one is a set of press images depicting Sapphire's Radeon RX 590 Nitro+ Special Edition graphics card.

Image Source: Videocardz

Looking at the images, it appears Sapphire is recycling the same custom "Dual-X" cooler that's found on its other Nitro+ cards, such as the Radeon RX 580 Nitro+, but in a different color—it's blue this time around.

"The Dual-X cooler featured in the latest Sapphire Nitro+ RX 500 Series cards is an all-new design. We've doubled the fin surface area and used an efficient combination of 2x 8mm and 2x 6mm copper heatpipes. As a result, both the noise level and temperatures are down compared to our previous generation," Sapphire explains.

According to Sapphire, the pair of 95mm fans on the Dual-X cooler have an 85 percent longer life than traditional fans and repel dust. What's perhaps more unique is that Sapphire's partners will replace a fan if it goes bad, rather than having the user send back the entire card.

"To resolve a specific fan issue, Sapphire’s Quick Connect System provides a quick and easy solution. If there’s a fan issue detected, the user doesn’t need to return the entire card—Sapphire’s partners will send out a replacement fan directly to the customer or the retailer," Sapphire says.

Cooling aside, Sapphire's upcoming Radeon RX 590 is powered by AMD's Polaris 30 GPU. This is another refresh of Polaris, and it's built on a 12-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process. Rumor has it the refreshed GPU will feature the same number of stream processors (2,304) and compute units (36) as both the Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 480.

The presumed benefit will come down to higher clockspeeds. If AMD improved the power envelope, it's also possible that Radeon RX 590 cards will hold their boost clocks for longer periods of time. It's all speculation right now, though hopefully not for much longer.