Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 1GB Review

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


This is where the Sapphire Vapor-X really comes out to play. The temperatures it displayed throughout testing are nothing short of ground-breaking for such a powerful card. Even though the 40nm core on the HD 5870 is known for its low heat output, the numbers we were seeing took us by surprise...so much so that I had to retest four times. To make matters even better, the fan went about its job in near silence. What more could you ask for?

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Power consumption is exactly what we would expect from a mildly overclocked HD 5870. Sapphire didn’t make any claims of increased efficiency through higher-end components so such a small difference suits us just fine.