Introduction

Sapphire first introduced its graphics cards which implemented the Vapor-X coolers back in 2007 with its 3870 Atomic cards. The Vapor-X technology meant that graphics cards could be efficiently cooled and still remain silent using a liquid coolant which vaporised at the hot GPU’s IHS. Recently Sapphire has revitalised their Vapor-X video cards with the birth of the HD 4850 and 4870. Today we’ve kindly been given the 4850 to review, let’s see how it performs.

About Sapphire

Pioneers in a new era of how data is displayed and games are played, Sapphire shepherds the performance oriented with ground-breaking solutions to an environment that remains in a constant state of flux and ultimate evolution. For over ten years Sapphire has held true to its unwavering commitment, the commitment to deliver the most feature rich and soundly engineered products. Because of Sapphire's firm position on achieving excellence with each product that leaves our ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factories, you can rest assured that your customers will recognize YOUR commitment to selling only the highest of quality components.

Features

• 256-bit memory interface
• Quite and Powerful Dual Slot Vapor-Chamber Cooler, Under 20 dbA in 2D Operation, under 30 dbA in 3D Operation before 85 degree °C
• DirectX® 10.1
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
• Dynamic geometry acceleration
• Game physics processing capability
• ATI Avivo™HD video and display technology, Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray™ and HD VideoBuilt-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound supportOn-chip HDCP
• ATI PowerPlay™ technology

Specifications

• I/O Output: VGA/DL-DVI/HDMI
• Core Clock: 625 MHz
• Memory Clock: 993 MHz
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• 512MB /256bit GDDR3 memory interface
• On-board HDMI
• 7.1 Audio Channel Support
• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
• Shader Model 4.1 support
• Dual Slot Vapor Chamber Cooler

Vapor-X Cooling

Vapor Chamber Technology is based on the same principles as heatpipe technology. A liquid coolant is vaporised at a hot surface, the resulting vapor is condensed at a cold surface then the liquid is returned to the hot surface. The recirculation process is controlled by a patented wick system. SAPPHIRE Vapor-X flattens the whole system into a slim chamber - which in the graphics application is mounted in contact with the surface of the graphics chip.

NB. Insight into Vapor-X Cooling taken from Sapphire’s website, you can read more about the technology of this card here.