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.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCI-Express power cable
• CrossFire bridge
• HDMI cable
• DVI adapter

The Card

Sapphire's card looks very powerful thanks to the large cooler with its edgy design.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one full-size DisplayPort, one full-size HDMI port, and two dual-link DVI ports. You may use all outputs at the same time.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2, enabling the use of hubs and Multi-Stream Transport.


You may combine up to four HD 7950 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher frame rates or better image-quality settings.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.