Sapphire HD 6870 Vapor-X Edition Review - PAGE 1

Over the last few years both NVIDIA and AMD have started to allowed their partners to release custom designed graphics cards whenever a new reference design launches, but often it still takes a few months before the more exciting offerings hit the market. Each manufacturer has their own design and style when it comes to making a custom product; some companies chose to alter the clock speeds and thermal solutions, while others make changes at the PCB level. There are some companies, however, that improve upon a product in just about every way, as is the case with the popular Toxic and Vapor-X edition graphics cards designed by Sapphire.

The product that we are going to be looking in this review is part of the Vapor-X series, which uses Sapphire's custom design, built around a reference clocked Barts XT GPU. This card features Sapphire’s exclusive Vapor-X heatsink to ensure the core runs at its optimal efficiency level, along with a custom 10-phase power control and patented Black Diamond chokes. The improvements used on this model will allow the Vapor-X edition graphics card to have enhanced power efficiency and cooling capabilities while also increasing the total overclocking potential.

Along with the Vapor-X edition graphics card, Sapphire is also releasing a Toxic version of HD 6870 that utilizes the same thermal solution, but comes with increased clocks speeds of 970MHz for the core, and memory rated at 1150Mhz (4600MHz effective). This will give the consumer additional graphics processing power out-of-the-box, further improving price to performance ratio. Both of these cards do command a slight premium over the reference design, so we will have to take in-depth look at the Vapor-X to see exactly how the improvements affect the overall performance, acoustics and overclocking.