Introduction

At the moment we're going through these little phases with video cards; we get a couple in and then it dies down for a few weeks. Then a few more come in and it dies down a little bit again. The latest card to slide into the lab here comes from Sapphire and is an expansion of the Vapor-X series.

To be honest, I think it's going to quiet down a bit in the video card department due to the fact we should see the new Bulldozer platform launch next month from AMD and word is that AMD's next generation cards will come out this year, hopefully around Battlefield 3 time.

On the NVIDIA side of things we haven't seen much at all; the only card we've really seen lately that uses an NVIDIA based GPU is the ASUS MARS II. Of course, this isn't made by NVIDIA and is instead all ASUS. I'm not sure we're going to see much else from companies regarding NVIDIA GPUs in the meantime either, as it's all been a little quiet on the GTX 500 series front. No doubt time will tell, though, what companies are going to be doing.

Still, with that out the way, let's get into the card we have on our hands today, the Sapphire HD 6850 Vapor-X OC. First we'll start off looking at the package before we take a look at the card itself and check out the specifications on it including the overclock on offer. Once that's done, we'll check out the performance of the card and see how it stands up in our latest line-up of games before we wrap everything up.

Well, with that all said and done, let's get into the package.

The Package

Checking out the box, you can see that Sapphire is using the new Vapor-X package that we saw on one of their earlier Vapor-X cards. We won't go into too much more detail as you can really see everything from the pictures above.

Moving inside the package, we've got our Sapphire Select Club voucher which gives us an access key, a quick installation guide, driver CD and Dirt 3 Coupon that is used to get the game via STEAM. On the cable front we've got a full sized HDMI cable, mini DP to DP convertor, two Molex to 6-Pin PCIe connectors, DVI to VGA connector and a CrossFire cable. This is actually quite a healthy package, especially considering the HD 6850 of course isn't part of the highest series from AMD.