Sapphire HD 4870 Vapor-X 1GB Review - PAGE 14

Power Usage

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took readings during a demanding part of 3DMark06.)

In Sapphire's favor, the Vapor-X uses less power at load than the reference design HD 4870. It seems the Black Diamond branding is not just marketing.

However --once again -- the XFX GTX 260 proves the nemesis here, taking less juice than the Vapor-X, while delivering better performance.

Temperature

To measure core GPU temperature, we used the hardware monitoring program in RivaTuner 2.22. The idle temperature was taken after leaving nothing running, on Vista's desktop, for a minute. The load temperature was taken after two loops of Furmark running at 1680x1050.

Again, credit Sapphire for delivering some great performance on their innovative design: their Vapor-X cooling proves itself here to be a superior design, keeping the Vapor-X's GPU much cooler than the stock HD 4870's - a full 13C cooler than a stock cooler under load!

It would be nice to see a HD 4830 with Vapor-X cooling -- with the greater overclocking and good temperature management, a Vapor-X HD 4830 would all but assuredly be an excellent overclocker. Even though the Vapor-X delivers the best OC we've seen to date with a 4870 you can only go so far in these higher end cards.

Conclusion

Sapphire set out to build the best overclocking, air-cooled 4870 money can buy, and they did just that.  Well-built, it has components a step-up from the norm. The 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 is nice.  All of this added up to a great overclock for a 4870 and far lower temps than a stock card.

For enthusiasts, the card offers one of the best cooling performance one can find for a 4870. It is up to the user if whether to use this cooling for silent and cool operation or take advantage of it for maximum overclocking performance.

However, when it comes down to video cards, the bottom-line for most mainstream gamers is bang-for-buck performance. In this category, the Vapor-X's assets do not deliver to a degree. While the cooler, extra memory and high-quality components are indeed beneficial, at stock speeds they simply do not propel the Vapor-X much more than a hair above the performance of a regular, plain-Jane HD 4870. The cheapest aftermarket card I could find at this time was $169 with the average being $189 -$229. With the Vapor-X being priced currently at $229 it is a tad higher then other cards in its class. But one thing to note is that a 832mhz core clock is very impressive and is not a common speed that can be obtained easily for a 4870, if at all. Vapor-X's closest price-range competitor in our benchmarks was the XFX GTX 260 216 OC, which reliably maintained a significant performance advantage on the Vapor-X, and is currently selling for $229 on Newegg aswell.

For the mainstream consumer, perhaps a little factory overclocking would have gone a long way, in this particular video card's case. The cooler would have no trouble sustaining even a healthy, 8% overclock (or thereabouts), nor would this have caused unsafe levels of stress on this well-designed HD 4870.

Sapphire should be praised for building such a nice rendition of the HD 4870 -- the overclocking, power-saving, and well-designed cooler are good selling points to the enthusiast, but the Sapphire Vapor-X is still a tough mainstream sell against the diverse and inexpensive competition when it comes to the ultimate measure of a video card: how many frames are being pushed a second.

[Editor's Note: We decided to give the Vapor-X an Innnovation Award for their effort in designing a high performance custom cooling solution to handle the normally high temperatures of a HD 4870.]