Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

Introduction

It's been a bit of an AMD love fest lately when it's come to VGA with a lot of HD 6000 series making their way through the doors. It's not all that uncommon, though, as we tend to see a few months after launch companies start to release their different variations of the models that we begin to know and love.

Some choose to overclock, others choose to throw a new cooler on it, while some just go all out and do both. Today we're checking out the Vapor-X version of the HD 6870 which is a series we've grown fond of over the years thanks to the superior cooling it's offered over reference cooled cards.

With the HD 6000 series running a little warmer than people previously had hoped, it seems like the perfect candidate for a new cooler. So what kind of performance do we get from the card and does the cooler bring with it lower temperature, lower noise, or even both?

Well, before we find that out, let's check out the package, the card and then the specifications of the card in hand.

The Package

Cable wise we've got a pretty impressive array included. Apart from all the normal stuff we've also got a HDMI cable and mini-DP to DP connector. One of the better AMD card bundles we've seen when it comes to cables.

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Sapphire Radeon HD 6990 4GB Technical Run Down

Introduction

I wish we could offer you the performance numbers of the new HD 6990 4GB, but no thanks to my Australian location falling into the APAC region and the APAC region not always getting the same love as the European and North American ones, our HD 6990 4GB is running late.

The whole situation is made only worse by a public holiday here yesterday. That means while the card arriving a day beforehand would've caused an extremely busy day, at least it would have meant we would've had our performance numbers in time, since only the weak need sleep. The Sapphire HD 6990 4GB should be arriving literally any minute now and instead of having to type about the card as well as do all the testing and graphs, we thought we'd get that part out of the way first.

We've got all our slide decks from AMD and some images from Sapphire. We'll tell you all the stuff we normally would in a video card review outside of the performance of course. Because there's so much to cover as well, it means we can get the performance article to you even faster while making sure we can cover as much information about the new dual GPU beast from AMD.

The Package

Looking at the package, there's nothing really all that different to what we've seen before. Of course, the brand and model are very noticeable; so is the fact that Sapphire has chosen to let us know that it's a "Dual GPU Graphics Card".

Also on the front we can see a lot of the features like 4GB of GDDR5, DirectX 11, AMD HD3D, Display Port, High Speed HDMI, 7.1 HD Surround Sound and more. We can also see the new "Vision" labeling that AMD is going to start to push. The HD 6990 4GB falls within the "Black Vision" series which seems to be at the top of the tree.

As for the bundle; while we don't have a picture, we can tell you what's inside. Apart from the normal stuff like Driver CD, Manual, Sapphire sticker and CrossFire bridge, we've also got a bunch of adapters.

We've got three to be exact with two Mini Display Port to Single-Link DVI adapters being included. One is active while the other as passive. We've also got another Mini Display Port adapter with this one going to HDMI.

I assume we'll also see some form of power converters like we do from most companies, but we weren't able to confirm what exactly we would get. It's probably safe to assume that two Dual 6-Pin to 8-Pin PCI-E power connectors will be included. We'll confirm this in our performance article, though, when we take pictures of our own card.

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