In fast moving world of hardware development, you can consider ATI's Radeon HD 4800 series having well earned its veteran's pension by now. Released almost a year ago the Radeon HD 4800 series has proved quite a success for ATI, putting them squarely in the battle for the price to performance crown, and making them a bigger thorn in NVIDIA's backside. The foremost member of the Radeon HD 4800 series, the Radeon HD 4870 has been made in many different molds as different companies have tried out different methods of putting together this high performance video card. While reference Radeon HD 4870's are still selling well, the interesting cards have been coming from the big players. - NeoSeeker

Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1GB Vapor-X Style Review

The latest from Sapphire is this Vapor-X model of the Radeon HD 4870. So with some enhanced components and a promise of a more efficient cooler, Sapphire recently unveiled its new look for the Radeon HD 4870, the Vapor-X series with two new cards, a 1GB and 2GB model. And if you are going shopping for a card between $150 and $250, you're going to have a wealth of options to choose from. Even if you are just shopping for a Radeon HD 4870 in particular, you'll have no shortage of different boards to look at. Today we will take a look at this new HD 4870 from Sapphire, which sells for around the $200 mark.

The Vapor-X received its name because it uses what Sapphire has termed vapor chamber technology, a totally custom cooler technology developed exclusively to reduce noise when the card is being pushed to its limits, and to keep the card far cooler than any stock cooling would allow. Sapphire built this cooling situation in-house, and it is a totally custom solution that goes far above and beyond the stock cooling you find in all the standard Radeon HD 4870's being sold today. And although this is the first card we've tested using this system, they've used before on a few different models with great success as we recall.

The Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X comes in an arctic themed box, mainly white and gray, with a penguin hanging out on an ice flow. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X isn't naturally overclocked, but the premise of this custom cooling and all the research Sapphire did to make the Vapor-X system just begs for some nice overclocking, so we endeavored to see what kind of performance advantage could be gained with overclocking. These Radeon HD 4800 series, while overall quite solid, did suffer from one notable drawback, they generally all run a bit hot and that has been limiting the overclocking performance somewhat.

Now Sapphire set out to build the best overclocking, air cooled Radeon HD 4870 money can buy, and they did just that. Well built, it has components a step-up from the norm. Their custom designed Vapor-X system is a far more effective cooler than the louder stock coolers you're seeing in the market. And the extra 512MB of GDDR5 memory is nice. All of this added up to a great overclock for a Radeon HD 4870 and far lower temps than a stock card. Sapphire should be praised for building such a nice rendition of the Radeon HD 4870, being well designed adn scoring great points for running cooler than the competition.