Sapphire VAPOR-X HD7950 Pro Reviews

Recent price cuts, free games, and driver-related improvements have brought AMD's Radeon HD 7950 back into serious contention for users looking for the best £250 graphics card on the market. Sweetening the deal that little bit more, AMD's providing more performance by way of a user-upgradeable vBIOS that increases the core clock from 800MHz to 850MHz, jumping up to 925MHz under the auspices of PowerTune with Boost. Sapphire generally mimics this new-and-improved Radeon HD 7950 with its Vapor-X Edition, which Boosts 25MHz higher, to 950MHz. Taking the opportunity of equipping the card with a quality heatsink and launching soon at £260 or so, the card nicely fills the price and performance gap between HD 7950 and HD 7970.

When I received the HD 7950 Vapor-X edition I sometimes get a little jaded and assume everything is a gimmick with some of this stuff now days. Well after using the card for a while I can confirm Sapphire has what it takes to build a very powerful card and it shows in the performance I got from this one here. The card comes out of the box overclocked and even has a boost BIOS for even more free performance. For those power users who want even more there is a lot left on the table just waiting for it to be tweaked and tuned to even more amazing performance. The cooler is no joke as the Vapor-X design keeps even my super high overclock nice and chilly without any excessive fan noise which is always an awesome thing to see. In the case of cooling solutions Sapphire is simply doing it right. The only real complaints I have is that I do not see why Sapphire chose to leave the memory untouched as there is huge potential here as well and could easily have pushed the card into new regions of performance in testing. When it comes to choosing a graphics card for your gaming rig there are many factors to consider. For all of the ones I see mattering Sapphire built it the right way in the HD 7950 Vapor-X and this makes it a card I can highly recommend to anyone looking for a card that simply works and works awesome no matter what you want to do.

The AMD Radeon HD 7950 was a solid card when it was released, but the Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X shows the full potential of this GPU!

How to sum up this card? Overall it performed admirably in all tests and did so with surprisingly low noise. The Vapor-X cooling solution held true to its roots and kept the card both cooler and quieter than most other cooling solutions even when pushing the card to its maximum capabilities. The EZ OC button offers an effortless factory overclock that improves performance for free, though it is really of questionable value since I can't imagine any user ever not enabling the higher clock speeds. The output configuration on the card is a bit different than others, but not to a degree that will hamper many configurations. As with almost all AMD cards, you will need an active DisplayPort to HDMI or DVI adapter to run Eyefinity resolutions. It would have been nice to see an active adapter included in the bundle with this premium card, although the free HDMI cable is a nice addition.

Sapphire's HD 7950 Vapor-X is a well-rounded custom design HD 7950. It comes with an overclock out of the box that gives it a 4% performance lead over the reference design HD 7950. Sapphire used AMD's dual BIOS feature to put a second BIOS on the card that runs the card at even higher clocks of 950 MHz, resulting in another 3% improvement. What makes this mode much more appealing is the fact that Sapphire did not increase the GPU voltage to achieve stability. As a result, power, noise, and heat are not significantly higher than in normal mode, which is why I recommend all users activate Boost mode as default. This leaves normal mode without a real benefit. It would have been nice if Sapphire had optimized the normal BIOS for super-low noise-levels, easy given the low temperatures. I also miss an overclock on the memory.