Cooling

We won't test the reference cooler once again, all the details are available here. But we shall examine the cooler on the Sapphire's card, though we have already reviewed similar solutions as well.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X Overclock 1024MB
Vaporizing chamber is the key feature of Vapor-X coolers. Liquid coolant vaporizes on the hot surface, the resulting vapor condenses on the cold surface, and is taken to the hot surface again. This recirculation goes on inside a degasified chamber, controlled by a complex capillary system. Vapor-X chambers are very thin, mounted directly on GPU crystals. This solution cools both the core and memory chips. Its performance is further boosted by a large heatsink with a slow fan in the center. This solution is noiseless.

Traditionally, we monitored temperatures using RivaTuner.

AFOX Radeon HD 5850 1024MB, XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition 1024MB

AFOX Radeon HD 5870 1024MB, Manli Radeon HD 5870 1024MB

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X Overclock 1024MB

XFX Radeon HD 5970 2x1024MB

Sapphire's cooler proved to be the most efficient among the tested. Speaking of heat, all HD 5870 cards have core temperatures of up to 80°C, which is great for today's high-end graphics cards. Coolers remain quiet at that. The same can be said about HD 5850 cards as well.

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