from the small amount of the reviews i have seen the pulse seems to come towards the bottom of all the temp or performance benchmarks and the mercury oc and the red devil seem to come towards the top and the pure seems to come upper middle. just dont want to regret my choice and would prefer to pay more to get the right choice.
It isn't something I'd be too worried about, all the cards look decent. It is normal that the more premium models come higher up the charts.
An alternative option if you particularly wanted a premium model is to buy a 9070, since their power consumption is low enough that e.g. I believe the red devil just has 2 connectors. That said, it is rarely good value for money to buy a premium model from a lower spec GPU, rather than an entry-level model from the higher spec GPU.
This was when they'd just come out, people were recommending the Pure, IIRC in general the 7900XT/XTX ran rather hot didn't they, so it would make sense going for higher model with better fans, keeping the temps down, which often yields quieter RPM fans overall, ramping wise. But who knows, it was years ago
I suspect there's wires being crossed somewhere. From what I can recall, the 7900 XT/XTX was first widely available with the AMD reference models and you could buy one of those even with a Sapphire logo on the box. The early batches were not good, some actually had a fault with their cooler and had to be returned.
There was advice at the time to buy the Pulse instead of the reference model and so far as I know, the Pure didn't exist back then (I
think it was first introduced with the launch of the 7700 XT).
Nice, I'd imagine the Pure would still be quieter, otherwise, what exactly is the extra paying for over the 2, as there's also the faster more expensive Nitro that follows after the Pure.
With Sapphire, it varies a lot. Sometimes they use the same PCB and cooler and even between the Pulse and the Nitro there's practically zero meaningful difference (for awhile, quick swap replaceable fans was a big bonus for the Nitro), but in the later gen the Nitro cards seem to be more distinct, like their use of the 16-pin and the magnetic plate to hide the cables.
Without a detailed tear down it is always hard to say (e.g. more phases, an extra heatpipe or two, swapping aluminium for copper), but they do look the same for certain GPUs. The main visible difference for the Pure is that it is: white and has RGB. To give an example of how it varies, with the 9060 XT it has ball bearings and the Pulse has sleeve bearings, but that's only a difference for the 9060. Similarly, the 9070 non-XT Pulse is 2-fan, whereas the Pure is 3-fan, but that's not the case with the 9070 XT.
