Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X Video Card Review

Today we are taking a look at our second retail ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, as we looked at the ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak a few weeks ago. The card that we have for you today is the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X which is, to our knowledge, the first ATI Radeon HD 5870 series graphics card to deviate from the reference design when it comes to the GPU cooler, and on top of that it comes overclocked right out of the box. According to Sapphire this graphics card will feature up to a 10% boost in performance over a standard Radeon HD 5870, while at the same time being 14 dBA quieter and much cooler! You might expect to pay a pretty penny for features like this, but the retail price on the card is $399.99. So, for an extra $10 over the price of a standard card you get a better cooler and improved performance! This is a little different than previous Vapor-X graphics cards as none of those were factory overclocked. Sapphire hinted that a Toxic or Atomic card might be coming out later, but we don't expect that to happen until production yields of 40nm GPUs get better over at TSMC as it is really hard to find any Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards on the market today.

The picture above shows the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X edition card on the bottom with the reference based ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak video card sitting above it. Both cards feature identical PCB's, but the cooler differences make a major difference when it comes to both performance and aesthetics. Last month, Sapphire revealed that the vapor chamber technology used in SAPPHIRE Vapor-X coolers comes from Microloops. According to Sapphire they are the only company using this cooling technology on video cards.

The clock speeds on the Vapor-X are overclocked from the factory, which means the 1,600 stream processors are running at 870MHz instead of 850MHz. The Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X's 1GB of quad-pumped GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1.25GHz (5.0GHz effective) versus the AMD reference clock of 1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective). The Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X is still a dual-slot graphics card that measures in at 10.5" in length, so it is half an inch shorter than the reference card thanks to shorter length of the Vapor-X cooler. ATI CrossFire will be supported via the two interconnects located on the top left of the card as you can also see in the image above. On the right motherboard you will be able to run up to four of these graphics cards from CrossFire X. LegitReviews

Benchmark Reviews has also tested the Sapphire Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X Video Card 21161-03