Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X Review - PAGE 2

Impressions

The star of today's show is the Vapor-X cooler design. As we seen in Vapor-X models of the HD 4870 and HD 4890 tested earlier in the year, the Vapor-X is called such because of what Sapphire calls "Vapor Chamber Technology." Vapor Chamber Technology -- or V.C.T for short -- is made exclusively by Sapphire to help keep things more than a few degrees cooler than the stock cooler. 

Basically how it works is that moisture/vapor is contained in a sealed, thin rectangular chamber directly on top of the GPU's copper heat sink. The vapor helps improve the efficiency of the heat dispersal. Moisture can quickly transport heat from the hottest parts of the baseplate on top of the HD 5870's GPU. And when the vapor evaporates, removing heat, the chamber gradually cools than re-condense the vapors, starting the process over again.

On the outside though, the Vapor-X cooler appears to be of a fairly standard design. Unlike the stock HD 5870 the fan has been moved towards the center, now resting right above the GPU. The Vapor-X HD 5870 makes use of less metal than does the standard heavy HD 5870, but still has ample heat fins stretching across almost the entire length of the card. Three long copper heat pipes move heat out from the baseplate to the fin array. The black plastic shroud covering the cooling apparatus also has a bunch of perforations in it to allow for air to circulate.

Sapphire's engineers have definitely spend some working on this card, tweaking and changing around the PCB as they saw fit.

Specifications

The HD 5870 Vapor-X enjoys a mild overclock of 20 MHz on the core, and 25 MHz for the memory clock, making it the first OC'ed (technically speaking) card on the market, as far as we know. We imagine that Sapphire will be releasing Atomic and Toxic OC'ed models of the HD 4870 so we can understand that they would want to push the overclock sky-high with the Vapor-X right out of the gates. Nonetheless a small OC is better than no OC -- especially when you there aren't any other OC'ed cards around.

Like the rest of the HD 5000 series, the Vapor-X HD 5870 is ready for DirectX 11. DX11 has a lot of promise to bring great benefits to gamers -- certainly much more than DirectX 10 delivered. With computer shaders and a new toolset of visual tricks and improvements, and more optimizations that allow for better parallel processing performance, DirectX 11 will probably be embraced to a much greater extent than DX10.

Eyefinity is also new this generation around for ATI cards. It enables users to use up three monitors -- either as independent displays, or a big meta-display -- with each video card. CrossFireX allows you to technically increase this number up to 12 displays with four HD 5870 cards.

The 40nm GPU has over 2 billion transistors in it. That is quite the wallop. With 1600 stream processors you are not likely going to run into any gaming stumbling blocks anytime soon with the Sapphire HD 5870.  

  * denotes cumulative effective efforts coming from 2 GPU's (i.e GTX 295: two GPUs with 240 cores equal 480)

Now that we are acquainted, let's put the Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X in action.