Coolers

Sapphire Vapor-X HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

The cooler features a large heatsink with heatpipes and a vaporizing chamber, a smaller heatsink for power elements, and a fan. The device cools both the GPU and memory chips. The fan is rather large and slow hence quiet.

Sapphire Toxic HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

This cooler is the same.

Sapphire HD 6850 1GB GDDR5

Also a similar cooler, but without a vaporizing chamber, and with a smaller fan. Note that this device only cools the GPU.

Sapphire HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

The cooler features a central heatsink with a copper baseplate for the GPU and two heatsinks for memory chips. There's also a cylindrical fan. The device is rather quiet which means that GPU temperature isn't very high.

Temperature monitoring results

We measured temperatures using the MSI Afterburner utility.

Sapphire Vapor-X HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

Sapphire Toxic HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

Sapphire HD 6870 1GB GDDR5

Sapphire HD 6850 1GB GDDR5

As you can see, coolers on custom cards are much more efficient than the reference one: 66°C versus 80°C and higher. Although 80°C isn't critical for such cards either.

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