Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X - The Cool Dude
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
Based on previous experiences, our biggest gripe with Sapphire's vapor chamber technology cooler was that it didn't really work any better than some of the heatsink and fan based coolers. This time round, things got a little different. At load, the Sapphire card recorded a 'cool' 63 degrees Celsius, which marks a commendable 15 degrees Celsius improvement over the stock cooler. Now this is the sort of improvement we want from a vapor chamber based cooler to justify its extra cost.
Power Consumption
Power consumption figures of the Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X were in line with our expectations, since they were nearly identical to a reference Radeon HD 5870. Despite its high performance, the two Radeon HD 5870 cards managed a remarkably low power draw when compared to the two NVIDIA cards.
Overclocking
Using the in-built ATI Overdrive overclocking utility, we were able to push the Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X to the maximum allowable limit of 900MHz at the core and a stunning 5520MHz DDR at the memory. This gave us a slight boost in performance, bringing the Sapphire's card score on the Extreme preset of 3DMark Vantage up to 8548 from 8354. This was still some way off the 8970 3DMarks achieved by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. Perhaps third-party overclocking software tools might help push the card even further, but just be mindful of how much you nudge it; you wouldn't want to spoil your investment for just minor increments.