Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X

    For a period there every six to eight months or so we'd see a new GPU and leaps of performance gained from the cards that had just come out but over the past few years this seems to have slowed down and for better of worse since ATI released the Radeon 4870 last June there haven't been too many major jumps ahead of that card except of course the 4870X2 or from Nvidia as well. Mid-range has seen tremendous improvement to offering phenomenal value in the sub-$100 market but above it. Recently though AMD did follow this up with the Radeon 4890 which we looked at launch and now with some time since then we're seeing the launch of 1GHz variants of the 4890 and non-reference cards. Today we'll be looking at one of those with the Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X.     Sapphire's Vapor-X line has been around now for some time and is Sapphire's custom heatsink and fan combination. It runs quieter than the standard heatsink and also should allow for better overclocking. Our model came pre-overclocked with a core of 875MHz (25Mhz more than normal) and 1GB of GDDR5 running at 1050Mhz (75MHz above the standard clock). It also is a very slick design and on Sapphire's blue PCB as opposed to ATI red. In addition ramsinks cover all of the memory modules which probably allows Sapphire their overclocked memory to run stable.   Sapphire have also decked out the video output ports of the card with every type on the market: DVI, VGA, HDMI, and even DisplayPort which hasn't quite caught on yet with monitors. Sapphire also includes a DVI-to-HDMI cable rather than the standard dongle with other ATI cards which is a nice bonus.   The box is quite cool, no pun intended, and should stand out among the typical CGI characters on most video card boxes and all of the features of the 4890 series are shown off in the specs on the box. The bundle is fairly standard other than the previously mentioned DVI-to-HDMI cable with a driver CD, two PCI-E to molex power adapters, Cyberlink DVD software, and as a bonus they also include 3DMark Vantage. Game bundles have come in and out of favor over the years and these days the trend is to not include a game unless you get it as a combo with hardware. We've been over the standard features of the Radeon 4000 series time and time again but we'll go over them again very quickly: 2nd-gen 55nm production process, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, the only card with DX 10.1 support, and 7.1 uncompressed audio over HDMI. Time is a little tight right now as other articles are cooking so we'll move onto Sapphire's techincal specs and benchmarks.     Here are the specs from Sapphire.   1. Award winning Vapor-X Cooler with heatpipe, silent and powerful 2. Sapphire patent pending Black Diamond Choke 3. 4 display outputs: DP+HDMI+DL-DVI+VGA 4. Full solid capacitor design 5. Microsoft DX10.1 support 6. PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface 7. Dynamic geometry acceleration 8. Game physics processing capability 9. 1GB/256-bit GDDR5 memory interface 10. Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080 11. On chip HDCP support 12. ATI CrossFireX? multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance. (Use up to four discrete cards with an AMD 790FX based motherboard) 13. ATI Avivo HD Support ATI Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray? and HD Video. Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) DVD Upscaling Dynamic Contrast Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support 14. Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay? technology 15. ATI Stream technology   Here's our test system. Mother Board Gigabyte 790GX CPU Phenom II X3 720 BE Memory Corsair XMS 6GB Hard Drive Western Digital SE 16 750GB Case Tsunami Thermaltake Display Samsung SyncMaster 30" Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 with the lATI Catalyst 9.5 drivers from AMD. V-sync was disabled. Forceware drivers were version 182.08. It should be noted that though our ATI Radeon 4890 had it's GPU clock speed bumped up 50MHz as was our BFG GeForce GTX 260 216 to 590MHz from 576MHz and 1296MHz for the memory from 1242MHz standard. Of course as mentioned the Sapphire is also overclocked but keep in mind our reference 4890 has slightly higher clocks peeds as does our GTX 260.       Of  all the games we tested Crysis seemed to show the biggest gains, perhaps due to using more memory bandwidth than the others despite the lower resolution Crysis: Warhead is full of detail.   Left 4 Dead continues to be a very popular multiplayer game thanks to Valve's touch but we don't see much gain here from the extra 75MHz memory clockspeed despite maxing out AA and AF settings. UT3 is a highly popular engine but may not stress memory bandwidth. As we see not a huge gain over the standard 4890.   World in Conflict shows similar results to the other games we tested.   3DMark 2006 is an older synthetic benchmark but we don't want to move to Vantage with the heavily weighed PhysX optimizations for Nvidia. We see a similar pattern to our other numbers. Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo. Cool 'n Quiet was enabled. Idle Load Radeon 4890 1GB 172 281 Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X 188 303 GeForce GTX 260 "216" 165 265 Radeon 4850 512MB 140 235 The extra memory clock seems to suck up some extra juice as well unfortunately compared to the standard 4890. Overclocking we maxed out at 990MHz for the GPU which was actually slightly below our Gigabyte 4890 and 1.15GHz for the memory. A higher core clock seems to be more effective in increasing the framerate 10-15% than overclocking the GDDR5 memory which may not be saturated by today's games. As mentioned earlier the card does run quieter than the standard 4890 fan and as far as cooling they appeared in our testing to be about even in temperature. Conclusion:Overall we're very pleased with Sapphire's Radeon 4890 Vapor-X, it offers a good alternative to the standard 4890 design and does so at the same price point of $229. This is what 4890 cards go for right now so that means there is no price increase. Unfortunately, we thought we'd see more gains at higher resolutions from the extra memory clock but it doesn't seem to be that large although in our testing Crysis did show some better results. The card overclocks well but so did our standard 4890 card so there it is a wash. It does run quieter, features a good bundle, and looks great so it is a card we can highly recommend. If you find a deal on a 4890 and the Vapor-X offers nothing extra you like you can't really go wrong with the 4890 but at the same or similar price or if you're looking for a non-standard or quieter card, the Vapor-X is a great choice. Pricing:We don't see the Vapor-X in our pricing system yet but you can buy the Sapphire reference 4890 for $199 after rebate from Amazon. Score: 96%

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Tags: blu-ray crossfire gddr5 displayport geforce gtx260 hd4870 hd4850 hd4890 hdcp hdmi heatpipe overclocking phenom physics radeon vista 3dmark