Sapphire HD 4870 2GB Vapor X Series Review

ccokeman - March 24, 2009
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Testing:

To test out this latest video card from Sapphire I will run it through a series of game tests and synthetic benchmarks to see just how the performance compares to that delivered by similar video cards as well as its direct competition from the green camp. The OverclockersClub test system will be run as listed with the processor at 3.0GHz. The respective video card settings that will be used are the driver defaults with settings made in game as noted to provide as few variables as possible.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): Sapphire HD 4870 2GB Vapor-X
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64-bit

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire HD 4870 2GB Vapor-X 822/1086

To overclock the Sapphire HD4870 2GB Vapor-X edition I started out with ATI's Catalyst Control Center and used the Overdrive tab to increase the GPU and memory clock speeds as well as bumping the fan speed to 100% for the most potential benefit. The core clock speed maximum in the CCC was 800MHz so that seemed like the logical point to start at. The Vapor-X card did this with ease and did not fail in benchmarks or with Futuremark. Since the CCC was limited in the clock speeds that could be set, I next moved to Riva Tuner 2.24 to push the clock speeds higher than the CCC would allow. I pushed upward until I was no longer able to successfully complete gaming tests or pass benchmarks. The maximum where I could run some but not all of the benchmarks was 845MHz on the RV770 core. But with that said, I had to back down the clock speed to 826MHz on the core and 1086MHz on the GDDR5 memory to get full game and benchmark stability back. I was hoping the added cooling capability would offer a significant boost in clock speeds, which is something I did achieve with an increase of 77MHz on the core and 186MHz on the memory all while having a nice cool running card to boot. Maximum temperatures noted while running a 100% fan speed was 58 Celsius.