Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X

As we've already alluded to, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X sticks rigidly to AMD's reference clock speeds for this level of board, leaving us to focus instead on the use of a Vapor-X vapour chamber cooling solution on the card as its major selling point.  If you're looking for a more in-depth explanation of vapour chamber cooling and how it works, then you can find it here.


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At first glance, the Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X looks like it packs quite a big, bulky and hefty cooler (complete with 75mm fan), but this is actually belied by its relatively light weight.  That aside, what we have here is a pretty standard Radeon HD 4850 board design.


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Taking a look at this board from the side, we can see that the actual mainstay of the cooler is reasonably small, with the rest of the body of the cooler designed to help exhaust hot air out of the rear of the chassis.  We can also see from here that the cooler is a dual-slot affair, meaning that it takes up a little more chassis real estate than AMD's reference offering.


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Power is provided via a single six-pin PCI Express power connector, as per usual.


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CrossFireX support is also provided via the normal pair of inter-GPU connectors.


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Not a lot to talk about on the rear of the PCB, but here it is anyhow.


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In profile, we can see the Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X's dual-slot nature once again, while the board sticks with what is becoming a standard output configuration for recent Sapphire boards of a single dual-link DVI, VGA and HDMI connector.  Personally, I miss seeing two dual-link DVI connectors on the board, but the addition of HDMI as standard is certainly no bad thing.


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The 512MB of GDDR3 memory provided to this board comes courtesy of Samsung's K4J52324QH modules, which I believe are rated at 1GHz.

Packaging and bundle

So, we've seen the actual board now, but how does it appear on retail shelves?  Let's take a peek.


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There is only one thing I can say about the box art for this Vapor-X board, and that's "Awwwwww, penguins!!".  Really, is any more commentary required?  Okay, maybe just a little - The front of the box makes heavy mention of this board's cooling technology, as well as some other pertinent points from its feature set.

 
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The rear of the box trumps even this - "Awwwwww, a baby penguin!".  It certainly makes for a fluffy change to sword-wielding women, that's for sure.


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Bundled with the graphics board itself is a Molex to six-pin PCI Express power connector, paper manual, driver CD, Cyberlink applications discs and a "Ruby ROM" demo CD - Keeping things simple yet providing everything you should need to use the card.