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The Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X Edition is certain to satisfy a huge audience of gamers who simply can't afford the more expensive HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition. The build quality of the HD7950 Vapor X is exemplary, just like its bigger brother.
First impressions of the HD7950 Vapor X are extremely positive … while it isn't equipped with the HD7970 Toxic metal backplate, it feels substantial in hand and weighs significantly more than the reference card.
Sapphire have been consistently releasing high end video cards this year which emit only a modicum of noise. Their choice of high quality 90mm fans with aerofoil blades and dust repelling bearings ensure that airflow is high while noise levels are reduced as far as possible. Commendation should be paid to the engineering team who are evidently tweaking the bios profiles to ensure a perfect balance between noise emissions and cooling proficiency.
Regular readers will already be aware that I continually complain about rising noise levels of products in reviews, so it is always a pleasure to analyse a high end Sapphire graphics card. When we compare the HD7950 Vapor X against the reference HD7950 cooling solution it is difficult to believe they are from the same family.
In regards to performance, AMD's HD7950 hasn't disappointed, although the Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X is batting in a completely different ball park.
As our results have shown the Sapphire HD7950 Vapor X is often able to compete against the expensive AMD HD7970 reference card. Even more remarkable, when we pushed the core speed to 1,158mhz via TriXX software, it matched the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition at the slower of the two bios settings in 3Dmark 11, scoring more than 9,200 points.
Right now we have no idea of the retail pricing of this card. Looking online at time of publication, a heavily overclocked card, such as the Gigabyte HD7950 Windforce is priced around £270 inc vat. Taking an educated guess, we would assume that Sapphire's HD7950 Vapor X will be priced around the £300 inc vat point.
If you want the best equipped, fastest HD7950, then there is no doubt that this is the card you need to buy.
Pros:
- Fastest HD7950 on the market.
- Quietest HD7950 on the market.
- Our sample exhibited huge headroom for manual overclocking with TriXX.
- HD7970 beating performance when manually overclocked.
Cons:
- There will be a price premium for pride of ownership.
Kitguru says: Another market leading card from Sapphire, can they do no wrong in 2012?
That is fantastic, although ive a feeling £300 might not be possible with the card. I hope im wrong as I think if they get the price right this could sell well for them.
They make the best video cards on the planet. Imagine what they could do if they worked with Nvidia.
Whatever happened to XFX by the way? they disappeared off the face of the planet.
I still think £300+ is too much for most people, but they are pushing the reference designs pretty much as far as they can do.
Excellent review as always Zardon. Quick question – will people actually be able to buy this one? the toxic 6GB has never appeared in the UK as far as I know.
Strange they didnt opt for the 6GB of memory again. or did they realise that its a waste of money basically?
thats very tasty but they need to make a 7850 like this for the mass audience and try to keep it around £200 🙂
Will they actually be selling this one though? the 6GB Toxic was never on sale anywhere I could find it.
Excellent, im more an nvidia guy, but Sapphire are pulling out all the stops lately with their designs.
Are you sure about the bios settings? At http://www.sapphiretech.com it says:
“On its standard settings, the SAPPHIRE HD 7950 Vapor-X Edition engine clock runs at 850 MHz with 3GB of the latest DDR5 memory clocked at 5000 MHz effective. When the Dual BIOS button is operated, the base clocks are the same but the PowerTune Dynamic Boost is enabled allowing the clocks to rise to 950 MHz or more on the engine. The fan profile and PowerTune limit is also changed to performance settings. In addition, users will be able to individually tune the card with SAPPHIRE TriXX, the company’s free to download software tool that allows key parameters to be adjusted for maximum performance.”
Yes, thats right 🙂 we tested in performance mode with core boost to 950mhz
Shouldn’t it than say 850mhz for bios 1 and 850mhz-950mhz for bios 2 in the chart on page one if the base clocks are the same? Also the GPU-Z Screenshots on page 2 confuses me because it looks more like bios 1 = 850mhz-950mhz and bios 2 = 950mhz?
In case the 850mhz-950mhz is correct for the tested bios it would have been interesting to see if the card can handle the 950mhz constantly ingame or frequently falls back to 850mhz?
I’m so curious because I don’t like this whole boost thing would have been much better to not imitate nvidia in that field an leave it fixed at 850mhz for bios 1 and fixed at 950mhz for bios 2.
Apart from that little uncertainty you have made a great Review an I wold like to thank you for that. 🙂 The only thing I mist was a small audio file to actually hear the characteristic of the fans at idle and load.
The first bios setting – the core runs at 850mhz. The secondary ‘boost’ bios has the core running at 950mhz. It was running at 950mhz constantly according to my analysis when under gaming or synthetic load. We only tested at the faster setting, as I dont imagine any enthusiast would pay a premium for this card to run it at the slower speed. seems almost pointless. Still it is a good fallback option in some instances.
The table on the first page, basically just shows the full gamut of core clock speeds. but 950mhz was used throughout testing.
Glad you liked the review.
Thank you for the fast answer at this late hour 🙂
Since the 660 Ti didn’t convince me with it’s cut on the memory bandwidth which is already the weakness of the 670 and 680 I will go with this one as soon as it is available providing that the price isn’t ruining the good package. The other Sapphire HD7950 with 950mhz and no boost is most likely louder or hotter I guess.