Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X 3 GB

Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and 670, which has caused HD 7970's pricing to go down quite a bit.



Sapphire's HD 7950 Vapor-X comes with a large dual-fan cooler that uses the company's famous vapor-chamber technology. On the Vapor-X you will also find a "Lethal Boost" button which switches to a second BIOS with higher clock speeds. With this BIOS, clocks are increased to 950 MHz GPU and 1250 MHz memory.

In our Sapphire's HD 7950 Vapor-X review, we will test both the normal and the boost BIOS (results marked as "Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X Boost 3072M").

Pricing of the Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X is 330 USD, which is a 10% premium, or $ 30 over the reference design.

HD 7950 Market Segment Analysis

	Radeon HD 7870	GeForce GTX 580	GeForce GTX 660 Ti	Radeon HD 7950	Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X	HD 7950 Vapor-X Boost	GeForce GTX 670	Radeon HD 7970	HD 7970 GHz Ed.	GeForce GTX 680
Shader Units	1280	512	1344	1792	1792	1792	1344	2048	2048	1536
ROPs	32	48	24	32	32	32	32	32	32	32
Graphics Processor	Pitcairn	GF110	GK104	Tahiti	Tahiti	Tahiti	GK104	Tahiti	Tahiti	GK104
Transistors	2800M	3000M	3500M	4310M	4310M	4310M	3500M	4310M	4310M	3500M
Memory Size	2048 MB	1536 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	3072 MB	3072 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	3072 MB	2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	384 bit	192 bit	384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1000 MHz	772 MHz	915 MHz+	800 MHz	850 MHz	950 MHz	915 MHz+	925 MHz	1050 MHz	1006 MHz+
Memory Clock	1200 MHz	1002 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	1502 MHz	1375 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz
Price	$250	$430	$300	$300	$330	$330	$380	$430	$400	$480