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Impressions

The titular "Vapor-X" is about the novel cooling technique Sapphire uses to keep these cards' GPUs chill. Unsurprisingly, the Vapor-X uses, you guessed it: vapors. The "Vapor Chamber Technology" is about keeping a small amount of water vapor in a sealed chamber directly above of the GPU. The vapor aids the cooling; the moisture helps move heat from the hottest parts of the chips. After the vapor evaporates, taking some heat further from the hottest core, on the edges of the chamber the vapor condenses when cooled, starting the cycle over again.

It is important to note that this Vapor-X cooler doesn't require any extra maintenance, or fiddling with water or what-not, so don't worry about that. Besides the unseen vapors at work, it operates as a standard cooler.

A circle of curved aluminum heat fins, about a centimeter high, and with a diameter of 8.5 centimeters, rest above the center of the video on an aluminum base-plate (wherein lies the Vapor Chamber). A fan, with 9 very curved blades, keeps the air flowing. A plastic shroud ensures that air is pushed out the half of the bracket of this dual-sized cooler. Unfortunately a DVI port hampers this air flow somewhat, by blocking the lower half of the exhaust pushed through the shroud.

It is interesting to see the changes made between the Sapphire Vapor-X models of the HD 4870 and the HD 4890. In the HD 4870 model, the aluminum heat sinks reached to about 150% of the the height reached with the HD 4890. However the HD 4890 Vapor-X makes up for this missing height by having more robust and more curved, taller fan vanes. Also this time around with the HD 4890, the heatsink coverage of the memory chips is much better, leading one to suspect a greater memory overclocking potential this time around.

Let's play spot the Vapor-X's !

Judging from our prior review of the HD 4870 Vapor-X and seeing the HD 4890 Vapor-X in action, this Sapphire cooler is certainly a sizable step up from the stock/default cooler found on HD 4870 cards.

As a side note worth mentioning, this cooler is also relatively quiet in normal operation.  

Specifications

Sapphire expended some extra care on the power system for the HD 4890  Vapor-X. They used "Black Diamond" patent pending chokes to improve power efficiency, and the power regulation circuits are cooled down a bit by an heatsink on the far right of the card. Higher quality capacitors were also used, to improve the life span of the card.

Eschewing the usual dual dual-link DVI ports configuration (also found with the HD 4870 Vapor-X), the HD 4890 Vapor-X mixes things up a bit more, going with a DVI output, VGA output, HDMI output, and DisplayPort output. This versatility is great to see. However keep in mind that even though it has 4 parts, you'll only to be able to output to two displays at once, as this limit is universal to all video cards of this generation.

The HD 4890 Vapor-X has a mild overclock, that doesn't seem to be advertised on the box. The default clocks for a HD 4890 are 850 MHz for the core clock,  and 975 MHz for the really fast, 1GB of GDDR5. The HD 4890 Vapor-X brings these up a notch by running at 870 / 1050 MHz. This is enough for some nice extra performance, but not as significant a game changer, as say the overclock on Sapphire's Toxic HD 4870.

As with our members of the HD 4000 series, the HD 4890s offer a large subset of features. These features include support for CrossFireX, allowing you to link together up to HD 3000 series and newer cards together with the necessary motherboard, DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support, the UVD 2.0 engine, which allows for on-GPU HD and Blu Ray video decoding, PCI Express 2.0 support for greater interconnect bandwidth, Avivo HD technology, HDCP, and built-in HDMI with 7.1 Surround Sounds support.