KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor-X box, another another moody 3D rendered woman, this time adorned in a kinky white outfit.
The bundle we received included a few video and power converter cables, Crossfire cable, software disc and HDMI cable.
The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X Edition is built around a blue PCB with a large twin fan cooler taking centerstage at the front.
The Vapor-X cooler on this model is based on a new vapor chamber designed especially for this series. It is a very heavy graphics card, immediately noticeable when you first pick it up.
Sapphire are using two 90mm fans with aerofoil blades and dust repelling bearings. This is a dual slot cooler.
The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X Edition is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. It takes power from a single 8 pin and a single 6 pin PCI E connector. The reference HD7950 is a dual 6 pin configuration, so Sapphire are clearly driving for maximum overclocked performance from the Vapor X.
The HD7950 Vapor-X offers two DVI output connectors, alongside a full sized HDMI and DisplayPort connector. All outputs can be used simultaneously.
The copper heatsink is connected to 2x 6mm and 2x 8mm heatpipes, which run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side. Sapphire incorporate several heatsinks to help enhance cooling of the VRM's. The GDDR5 memory is directly cooled by the base of the main cooler above. It is clear that Sapphire haven’t cut any corners in the design of this massive cooling solution.
The card ships with a dual bios, which can be easily selected via the button above.
Above, the faster bios setting (the other is set at 925mhz). For the review today we are testing with the higher 950mhz core setting as we don't imagine anyone buying this powerful gaming card will want to run at the slower speeds. AMD's Tahiti core is built on the 28nm engineering process, equipped with 32 ROP's/112 TMU's and 1792 unifed shaders. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,250mhz, or 5Gbps effective and is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface.
Fantastic reading thanks GTX660ti all the way for me !
I have wanted the HD7950 now for quite a while, but cant afford it. ive decided to wait until the next gen, later this year. good article, shows the good GTX660ti performance well.
Im very happy with my HD7870, will do me for some time, and when it doesn’t ill pick one up cheap to CF them,
Now this will totally affect my decision on buying a vga
GTX670 is great, but GTX660 ti is the bargain right now. I like that Sapphire card though, im sick of fan noise 🙁
Good article, very helpful as im thinking of buying one for my new system soon.
Greg, you might want to look at the Asus Direct CUII version of the GTX660Ti – I got one recently to replace a Gainward GTX260GS and the reduction in fan noise is astonishing.
I agree with Andrew. Even though the Gainward GFX cards are very durable, but if you want high quality Nvidia cards that are also silent you should look at the ASUS cards with the Direct CUII cooling solution. It’s really no comparison.
Kitguru said: “Today’s article won’t be featuring the AMD HD7970, HD7990 or Nvidia GTX680 or GTX 690/Titan. Not because we don’t like them, but because very few people can afford to buy them.”
This seems very disingenuous. There’s hardly any difference between the avg. 670 and 7970 prices. Does put nVidia at the top of the charts with the O/C’d 670 though. :
Well its not meant to be disingenuous. the GTX680 is the flagship to battle against the HD7970. If we included the HD7970 then we would need to include the GTX680, sometimes seen for £350.
The point was to try and get a variety of cards and not focus on the flagship single GPU cards.
Bear in mind the GTX670 didn’t get a top award in this test, due to the pricing. The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X did due to cost, cooling, noise etc.