The card

As noted earlier, the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X OC Edition graphics card features Sapphires quite famous Tri-X cooler with a total of five heatpipes, three 8mm and two 6mm ones. Vapor chamber is a technology Sapphire's using since 2009 on their high-end products and lately the company decided to combine it with a great number of heatpipes. This mix allows not only for low GPU but also for very low temperatures on the voltage regulation modules as well as on the memory. In order to move heat away from the large fin stack, there is the so called Tri-X fan array, which consists of three fans, each measuring 100 millimeter in diameter. The Tri-X cooler is definitely one of the most sophisticated models available and we would wish a similar cooler was available as an upgrade compatible with reference cards. As part of the Vapor-X series, the Tri-X R9 280X OC Edition uses black on blue color scheme and the overall build quality of the cooler is very good. Having a closer look at the top edge of the card we find the Vapor-X writing which acts as a load indicator. Depending on the load the backlight changes color. 



The Sapphire Vapor-X 280X OC Edition graphics card, or to be precise our sample of it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'180 MHz for the GPU and 1'750 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D benchmark with 15 minutes duration. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU with 1.20 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages. Sapphire is locking the BIOS to 1.20 volts maximum. We would like some more headroom with this card, since the powerdesign could cope with higher loads easily and the card could also be overclocked quite a bit higher.

For its Vapor-X R9 280X OC Edition, Sapphire makes use of an entire custom design PCB. The PCB color is black and features an improved power design. There is a total of 7+2+1 (GPU, Memory and PLL, PCIe) phases for the Vapor-X card versus 5+2+1 for the reference 280X card. GPU, memory and VRM are all cooled using the vapor chamber.
Checking the voltage regulation chip we find a digital multi-phase controller IORL 3567B from International Rectifier that is taking care of both GPU and memory paired with IOR 3553M mosfets. 



The memory chips used are made by SKhynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective). 

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - DIRT Showdown
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Far Cry 3
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 15 - Metro: Last Light
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 16 - GTA V
Page 7 - BattleField 3	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise levels
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 10 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2	Page 20 - Conclusion