Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X OC 6GB Graphics Card Review

When we look at AMD’s GPU lineup, the current top offering is as we know is the 7970 and in its own way it’s one of those cards that we do have a small soft spot for with its performance marked against its price. Just of late however and with the launch of some very impressive offerings from the green team at NVIDIA, AMD’s cards have been falling a little behind, but this is to be expected considering they were launched a lot earlier in the year.

Trying to keep the 7970 high up in the charts for now is going to take a little bit of work by AMD’s parters in developing tweaked and tuned variants of the base card and giving that little bit extra and try and show it’s still worth a shot if you’re in the market for a new card.

Moving over to Sapphire, as you may have seen from a couple of my previous reviews on Sapphire cards, I have always had to give it to their cooling department as they produce what I regard to be some of the best parter coolers out in the field with very effective heat dissipation and some of the quietest fans going at the same time. Another title they have to their name is against the Vapor-X cooling systems that they have developed and have made a huge impact with, with a large number of their cards featuring a vapour chamber based cooler at its heart.

The 7970 Vapor-X OC 6GB is another vapour chamber based card, but as we’ll see this little beauty has got a little bit more than just a simple overclock under the hood. Packing a whopping 6GB of GDDR5 memory, this 7970 certainly appears to have been given more grunt, but how it fairs in the real world is what we’re here to find out.