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

There are a number of things that I like about this card and this started from the moment I got it out of the box. The cooler design has a look that it means business but it’s too in your face about it at the same time. The grey and black patterns on the backplate finish the design off and for those that have a side window to their chassis, this would compliment Gigabyte’s Z77-UP4 TH motherboard that we looked at not too long ago.

Sapphire have made no claim that this was going to be one of the most powerful 7970’s on the market, but when we look at the results, packing a massive 6GB of GDDR5 memory onto the PCB alongside the overclock and Vapour-X cooler has certainly made a noticeable difference with the card pushing its way through to the front in a number of tests and rivalling the GTX 680 SOC, which we took as the most powerful single GPU card that we had ever had in!

The other impressive thing I have to mention with this card is its ability to go even further, over and above the shipped clock speeds – by a long shot. There have been a number of cards that have shown some good signs when overclocking the GPU core and memory, but when it came to a combined overclock, the speeds had to be taken back by a considerable amount in order to achieve a stable card. This card however defied my expectations and as I mentioned before, yes I was a little disappointed that I got so close to the 2000MHz mark and couldn’t reach it, but this just wasn’t to be – that said 1900MHz stable with the core at 1250MHz is remarkable and for once there wasn’t only just clocks to be had, but there was performance to be gained as well. Pushing the frame rates up by around 20fps in any game is a good result, but we will not that our CPU stayed at its stock speeds, so imagine what would happen if that was to be brought in line?

AMD’s cards have always had a reasonable price / performance ratio even given the latest releases from the green team, but if you’re after this power house then expect to be paying in the region of £400-420.  We will note that for this money you are in the same region as the price for two 7950’s in CrossFire, so there is a choice to be made. If space is at a premium in your case and you want the best you can get no matter what the cost, then this mighty packed offering from Sapphire is a little gem to consider.

So where does this leave us? Well as you can guess I do like this card, but like I found with the GTX 680 SOC, it is a lot of money to be shelling out, given that for the price you can get two lower cards that can give the same grunt and spread the cost. If however this isn’t a problem an/or you need the most grunt you can get in as smaller space as possible, then this is one to consider. As you would expect, this is worthy of our extreme performance award.