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Overclocking

The presence of a heatsink that has the vapor chamber teechnology should eliminate, at least partially, the problems with the excess of heat when overclocking. In order to properly take care of that problem, the fan speed was manually set at 100% during the overclocking tests.

It’s not possible to alter the clock frequencies from third-party software, as usually happens with new models, it’s necessary to wait more recent software releases for full support. However, AMD GPU Clock Tool does work, and that’s what we used to change the frequencies for the test.

Once the heatsink is removed, we can see the GPU and memory modules, both in the same area. There seems to be no difference from the reference board when it comes to the positioning of memory modules.

The heatsink solution developed by Sapphire differs from the reference board in many ways: the fan was slightly moved to the center, there’s the Vapor chamber technology which is featured in all Vapor-x, with a chamber that is directly in contact with the GPU, and a heatpipe in order to better dissipate the heat.

The card

The card presents itself with a different layout than the reference board: the main feature on the Vapor-x series from Sapphire is the different cooling system. As it can be seen in the picture, Sapphire has decided to use its own heatsink, with the Vapor chamber technology. The fan has been placed in the center, blowing air directly on the heatsink.

No changes on the connection ports: not only the two DVI outputs are present, but also an HDMI and a DisplayPort. This card supports the Eyefinity technology, which allows the card to connect up to 3 different monitors, also with 3D applications.

The Sapphire proposal, thanks also to the more efficient cooling system, is offered with higher frequencies than the standard: The GPU was set at 870 MHz (compared to the standard 850 Mhz), the memories at 5 Ghz (4.8GHz standard). In order to keep the stability when in use, Sapphire also modified the Vcore tension, going from 1.15V to 1.162V.

The consequences in this case should be seen in the energy consumption, in this case higher, and in the heat produced by the card; in this case, the Vapor chamber technology represents an advantage to the Sapphire proposal. In the next few articles we’ll analyze the card’s behavior and how much overclocking it’s capable of offering.

Introduction

As it usually happens, after the official launch of a new GPU architecture, there are many partners that propose their own version, reviewed and enhanced in many ways. It’s common for the partners to redesign aspects of the reference board, customizing some elements. With the Radeon HD 4800, as with the GeForce GT200, the partner manufacturers were the ones responsible for keeping the market alive with their many different specifications and cards.

Now that we have the new HD 5000 series for a few months in the market, it hasn’t changed: many customized versions can be bought and seen on the market. With this series of articles, we’ll be reviewing the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-x, a card proposed to the high-end market by the famous ATi partner.

The card doesn’t only offer high performances, but also a different cooling system than the standard, more efficient and capable of giving more possibilities of working with frequencies that are beyond the standard.

Conclusions - Final

Another highlight to be made concerns the great margin of overclock that this card can bring. With the test model, it was possible to bring the frequencies to 870 MHz and 5Ghz for GPU and memory respectively.

Despite overclocking it’s not supported, it’s worth highlighting this fact: The card can then reach a performance level which is very similar to the Radeon HD 5770, which costs around €25 more.

Conclusions - Part 3

The reason for the somewhat narrow price range is probably due to ATI’s own policy with the Radeon HD 4800: the continuous price cuts in order to make the card extremely competitive resulted in a very narrow margin between each one of the cards.

When compared to a solution such as the GeForce GTS 250, the ATI proposal seems to be superior: depending on the quality and resolution, a bigger amount of memory and less energy consumption seem to be quite convincing points. Of course, another fact comes into view: in a few weeks or maybe months, it’ll be possible to buy a Radeon HD 5750 for a more competitive price.

Conclusions - Part 1

In order to make a good objective evaluation on the new ATI Radeon HD 5750, it’s necessary to bring forward the prices of the other cards on the price range currently on the market. The current market situation is very complex: within an average of €50 difference, we find many different cards, including the two new proposals from ATI.

The fact they’ve been recently launched doesn’t work in their favor: resellers cannot lower their prices just yet, due to the lack of big sales. The launch price is always higher than what is generally seen after a few months. In this case, the difference in price for the new ATI cards only reveal their “novelty” value.

Noise

The heatsink system used by Sapphire is different from ATI’s reference system for the other HD 5000 card series: the solution on this review manages to keep very low temperatures, as we’ve talked about before.

Despite the heatsink being less efficient and complex from the other Radeon HD 5000 series, the noise is however very contained, both in idle and full load.

Energy consumption

The energy consumption analysis puts on evidence the enhancements made by ATI on their 40nm technology. With a full system consumption of 128 Watts when in idle and 287 when in full load, it’s clearly an enhancement from the values obtained with the “bigger” cards, such as the 5870 and 5570.

With these optimizations, the Radeon HD 5750 is capable of keeping consumtions that are lower than the HD 4770, for example.