Welcome to Rage3D and our review of the Sapphire HD5870 Vapor-X edition. Launching on November 3rd this card is a pre-overclocked version of the AMD ATI Radeon HD5870 graphics processing unit, first launched seven short weeks ago on September 23rd. Our first article gave you an overview of the architecture and features of the Cypress core, and our upcoming look at the Sapphire HD5850 will investigate the second tier enthusiast card's features and performance.

In this article we will examine not only the technology behind Sapphire's vaunted Vapor-X cooling, but the performance hinted at by AMD ATI's upcoming Hemlock - the HD5900.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X

Product Highlights

• MSRP $399

• 40nm Cypress core featuring 2.15Bn Transistors

• DirectX 11 / Shader Model 5.0 / OpenCL 1.0

• 870Mhz core with 1600 Stream Processors

• 2.72TFLOPS Compute Performance

• 1250MHz 256-bit GDDR5 (5000MHz effective)

• PCIe 2.1 Interface (Backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0)

• Two 2x3pin PCIe power connectors

• Dual DVI output + HDMI and Displayport

• 27W idle and 188W load power consumption