Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1GB

[Hanners]

There can be no doubting the credentials of AMD's Radeon HD 5870 as the current king of the hill when it comes to graphics boards, but thus far all we've seen on the market are reference-based cards from various partners. However, today sees all of that change courtesy of Sapphire and their launch of the Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X, a board which sports both factory overclocks and a custom-built vapour chamber cooling solution. Is it up to the standard of previous Vapor-X offerings, and more importantly can it stand out from the crowd of reference Radeon HD 5870 cards?

While the new, custom-built cooling solution is what we're really getting excited about here, Sapphire's Vapor-X board also features increases to both core and memory clocks - This leaves us with an out of the box core clock speed here of 870MHz (a 20MHz increase over reference clocks), while the board's memory gets a more notable 50MHz boost up to 1250MHz.

Naturally, as soon as we take a look at the Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X, that vapour chamber cooling solution stands out on account of its unique design. I imagine the actual aesthetic of the cooler will be one that enthusiasts either love or hate, but personally I'm rather enamoured by the rugged look of the cooler body - You get the feeling you could drive it over some big mountains or something. I wouldn't recommend trying it though.

Read the full review at Elite Bastards.

[poppachocks]

Great review. Nice to see Sapphire could squeeze a little better performance out of an already great card!