First spotted soon after AMD's release of its flagship ATI Radeon HD 5870 accelerator, Sapphire's HD 5870 Vapor-X has finally taken shape. From the looks of it, the final iteration seems to be slightly different from the CGI drawing that made for the older report. Sapphire's design methodology seems to be revolving around giving AMD's reference PCB better cooling than AMD's own cooler. Perhaps owing to lavish use of high-grade digital-PWM circuitry, there is very little room for improvement, leaving room only for cost-cutting, which surprisingly, doesn't form part of Sapphire's new card.

Unlike an older prototype in which the cooler shroud doesn't seem to be fully covering the PCB, the redesigned shroud fits the PCB like a glove, enhancing its aesthetics. The Vapor-X cooler uses a vapor-chamber design, that accumulates and distributes heat to the cooler better. Aluminum fin blocks on either sides of the GPU block disperse heat under the fan's air-flow. The AMD Cypress GPU that powers it is DirectX 11 compliant, which features 1600 stream processors, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface to connect to the 1 GB of memory onboard. Sapphire uses overclocked parameters, 870 MHz core (vs. 850 MHz reference), and 1250 MHz / effective 5.00 GHz memory (vs. 1200 MHz / 4.8 GHz reference). Sapphire's HD 5870 Vapor-X should be out in time for X-Mas.