Introduction

There's no denying that competition in the video card market is tough. It's even tougher for companies like HIS and Sapphire who only find themselves working for one side of the heated video card battle. With Sapphire only releasing ATI based cards, it means the company has to start to offer something more than the standard model sooner rather than later.

The good news is the company is on their game; just over a month after the release of the HD 5870 we're seeing the model get some special treatment from Sapphire. While they do offer quite a few series of cards like ATOMIC and TOXIC, the particular one we're looking at today comes in under the newer Vapor-X name.

The main focus of the Vapor-X series is cooling. With that said, though, it doesn't mean Sapphire can't have a bit of fun with the clock speeds. What we'll do before we have a closer look at those clocks is check out what's going on in the bundle. After that we'll then take a closer look at the card and see the new cooler that Sapphire is giving us.

If all that wasn't exciting enough, the HD 5870 Vapor-X from Sapphire is the first card that's going to be taken for a spin on our new benchmark setup. While the hardware hasn't changed due to the simple fact it's still some of the best on the market, we have moved to the new DirectX 11 enabled Windows 7 and also added a whole slew of new benchmarks including some new synthetic ones and real world games. The particulates? Well, you'll just have to wait a few pages to see. For now let's check out the package that Sapphire are offering.