Video Card

Like the HD 5870 Vapor-X model we looked at from Sapphire recently, the first thing we notice is the new cooler design that the company has opted for on this card. We can see a fairly large fan sits in the middle of the card with a nice looking shroud around it.

If you look carefully behind the fan and through all the aluminum fins, you can see the giant copper heatsink that Sapphire has opted to use. This should help keep temps down further then the standard cooler, there's only one way to find out though and we'll see what exactly the cooler is doing for us later on in the review.

Having a quick look around the card, there aren't any surprises here. Towards the back of the card we have our single 6-Pin PCI-E connector that's required to power the model, while closer to the front we have our two CrossFire connectors which give us the ability to run three of these together.

The I/O department doesn't show any changes for the simple fact that out of the box the standard HD 5700 and HD 5800 series offer an excellent choice in connectivity. What this means is we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors along with a single HDMI and DisplayPort connector.

Specifications

The Vapor-X series isn't about the raw FPS numbers; instead, it's about offering a card that should run either cooler, quieter or both thanks to the new heatsink/fan setup. With that said, it hasn't stopped Sapphire giving the model a very small bump in MHz.

Looking above, we can see they've moved the 700MHz core to 710MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 has moved from 4600MHz QDR to 4640MHz QDR. It's nothing major and really could hardly be called an overclock. However, it should still give the model a small bump in performance, all the same.