Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

A Closer Look at the Sapphire HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X

Sapphire’s HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X has a unique design with a partial-length heatsink covering the area directly above the core and making its way towards the backplate. Meanwhile, the rear portion of the card has a separate heatsink which is used to cool off the hot running VRMs. Its blue PCB makes the whole affair look faintly Gigabyte-esque while the length sticks to the reference 9.5”.


The cooler on the Vapor-X is comprised of a standard shroud that hides an aluminum and copper-based heatsink. Meanwhile, the topside memory modules are covered by way of a flat aluminum plate to dissipate their heat. Sapphire has also moved towards a bit more unique shroud design this time around with the inclusion of an inset blue logo on the outside edge.


The rearmost portion of this card holds a massive heatsink which is used to help cool down the VRMs of the 6-phase power design. We can see that Sapphire has also chosen to go with a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector layout due to the increased power consumption that comes with the larger amount of GDDR5 memory.

Sapphire seems to pride themselves on advancing technology on many fronts and here they have used their new “patent pending” Black Diamond chokes. These solid-state chokes have an integrated heatsink for improved thermal characteristics and supposedly offer 25% more efficiency than a normal choke.


The back of the Vapor-X shows us a simpler PCB layout when compared to the reference design but the largest differences lie with the additional heatsink here as well as the lack of a backplate or x-shaped support for the topside heatsink. The black heatsink we see here is used for the additional GDDR5 memory modules.


The backplate holds an amazing assortment of connectors and includes a single DVI-D, a VGA, a DisplayPort and finally a standard HDMI connector. This is more than enough to make this card future-proof on the connectivity end of things and for those of you who need an additional DVI connector, the included HDMI to DVI adaptor works extremely well.