Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC 3GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

As we already mentioned AMD provided us with Sapphire’s Vapor-X version of the Radeon R9 280X GPU. This uses Sapphire’s Vapor-X cooling solution which has a pair of 80mm fans on a dense aluminium shroud with four heatpipes; two 6mm and two 8mm.

The rear uses a rather chunky Sapphire Vapor-X backplate for additional cooling. Note if your first PCIe 16X lane is close to a motherboard heatsink (like it is on our LGA 2011 ASUS Rampage IV Extreme) then you may experience compatibility issues with the backplate touching the motherboard heatsink.

The card is not a full 3 slots design but is about 2.5 so effectively uses 3. The backplate also makes the slots behind it vulnerable so you could say this card actually takes up four slots.

Unlike the reference AMD Radeon R9 280X this uses two 8 pin PCI-Express power connectors opposed to a 6 and an 8 pin.

There are two CrossFireX connectors just like on the HD 7970 for 4-Way CrossFire. There is also a Sapphire boost button on the PCB to overclock the card further.

At the bottom you can see a closer look at the heat pipes protruding out from the GPU core.

The end of the card is an open shroud design that houses the fans’ PWM connection. You can see a closer view of the blue PCB too.

The rear I/O has two DVI, one HDMI and one DP. Note that AMD have tweaked the RX 2XX series so you DO NOT need a DisplayPort connection for Eyefinity. This means that any card that has four Display outputs (of which 1 is a DisplayPort) can run Eyefinity 6. Eyefinity can be run with two DVI and one HDMI.