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Sapphire recently ditched their hot 3D rendered ladies, focusing now on futuristic robots. Silicon injected babes or man eating robots? We like both.
The bundle includes a quality HDMI cable, some literature, power converter cables and a software disc. We do always recommend you check AMD's website for the latest drivers.
Sapphire have built the R9 280X Vapor-X OC around an eye catching black PCB. The triple fan cooler is encased in a metal surround with lovely blue accenting along the middle, like a sports car stripe. The three 90mm fans use aerofoil blades to increase airflow while reducing noise. Each of these fans ship with two sets of dust repelling ball bearings.
Eagle eyed readers will notice that the hefty cooler actually overhangs the PCB at little, exposing thick heatpipes.
Some hardware is very dull to look at, but we consider a good graphics card the supermodel of the technology world – and the Sapphire card certainly is a looker. The ‘Vapor X' on the side of the cooler glows when the card is active.
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC takes power from two eight pin power connectors, as shown above.
Not enough power? then the R9 280X is Crossfire capable, with two connectors available. There is a BIOS switch here to offer UEFI support.
A single link, and dual link DVI connector are present, alongside a full sized HDMI (1.4a) and DisplayPort (1.2) connector. Eyefinity is fully supported and no active adapter is required.
With the cooler removed, we can see the configuration a little better. The VaporX cards use the latest revision of a vapor chamber cooler. This chamber is mounted between the GPU and the base of the heatsink and cooler assembly.
The Tri-X cooler is mounted on top and incorporates multiple copper heatpipes to move heat through the aluminum fins.
You say at the bottom of the introduction page: “The Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X ships with a core clock speed of 1,030mhz and the GDDR4 memory is clocked at 1,400mhz (5.6Gbps effective), connected by a 512 bit memory interface.”
Is the “GDDR4” memory type a typo?
Yes, its GDDR5 – fixed. thanks!
for god sake, I just bought a triX yesterday – I have the worst timing ever. 🙁
I like the blue appearance. the cooler is spectular – never seen a company expose copper like that to cool the PCB. very clever.
the price seems quite good considering, I thought it would be around £400 inc vat.
Preordered the 290 Vapor-X thanks !
The looks of the Vapor-X cooling is stunning! The 290 will definately be in my new build. Does anyone know the lenght of the 290 Vapor-X card?
Hi Ralf, I just measured it – the cooler overhangs the PCB a little, so its around 300mm – long card.
When is it coming out?
Is that card faster than gtx 780?
Zardon tell me pls how much additional voltage mV was added for the overclocking of r9 290 vapor-x to 1205 in this review?
How did you set up your fans in you cas so you could keep the card the coolest possible? I’m thinking of buying one but I’m not sure what’s the best way to set my fans for it.
Could you give the full dimensions (lengthxwidthxheight)? Mini ITX builds can be a pain fitting everything!
Hey Zardon, I just got my R9 290 Vapor X and there’s this black goo between the backplate and the PCB, do you know what it is? Also can you make an overclocking guide for this GPU?
If you’ll show SLI up in the list there, have the decency to show Crossfire results too. And where’s 770 in the lists ? 280x is not competing with the lot in the list there. Price or performance wise.
Its nothing to do with ‘decency’. Believe it or not sometimes we don’t get access to all the cards we want to test and include them all every time we post a graphics card review.
I’m actually surprised by the 1920×1080 results just ran my Powercolor PCS+OC R9 290 through the same test Ultra preset AA 4x and Tesselation off my results were as follows (were any of your settings different?):
Min:33.5 FPS
Avg:81.2 FPS
Max:143.5 FPS
Max Temp(Via GPU-Z) 71C
I am definitely
enjoying your website. You definitely have some great insight and great
stories.
Vaporultra.com