Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 280X OC Edition Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 29.07.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X OC Edition,
Sapphire is offering a R9 280X based on a custom PCB paired up
with their own new cooling solution Tri-X with Vapor-X technology. Overall, the
Sapphire Vapor-X R9
280X OC Edition did very good
in our testing, performance is the way we expected it to be, cooling performance
is
great, since thanks to the Tri-X cooler the card is silent and we like
the design. In the case of the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC version the GPU is overclocked by 100MHz compared to the reference design from AMD and it's pity there is no memory overclocking. This card we could easily have plus 50 or even 100MHz on Hynix chips used in combination with the powerful Vapor-X cooler. |
- Performance
- Cooling performance - Design - Bundle |
||
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| The Vapor-X is one of the most sophisticated coolers we've come across. Sapphire is using a vapor chamber to establish contact with GPU, memory as well as power design. On top of the vapor chamber there are five heatpipes conducting heat from the GPU towards the fin stack and the from there, heat is dissipated by three 100 millimeter fans. This approach makes for excellent temperatures in idle as well as under load conditions. There is only one thing we would like to see improved/changed: the fan profile. Unfortunately this card is not as silent as it could be. We would love to see Sapphire providing another fan profile, which makes the card inaudible under idle conditions. Since there is plenty of headroom available in terms of cooling capacity, this should definitely be possible. | - Cooling performance | ||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Overall the 3D performance is good but as said
previously, we would like Sapphire to push the factory clocks on the
memory side further
in order to improve performance of this card by even more. Nevertheless
this is complaining on a very high level since on the GPU there already
is a factor OC of 100 MHz compared to the reference design. Overall this
card is capable of competing with a reference NVIDIA GTX 770. Idle power consumption of the Vapor-X R9 280X OC Edition card is rather high, since we measured 65 Watts on the wall, which is a whopping 21 Watts more than what we've seen on other Radeon R9 280X cards lately. Also load power consumption is high with 361 Watts. This is between 41 Watts more than other models. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| If we look-up prices on Geizhals.at we find that the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X OC Edition goes for 268 Euro. These days the cheapest R9 280X graphics cards are available for roughly 227 Euro, which means that the Vapor-X cooler and custom PCB account for an additional 41 Euro, which, in our opinion, is fair, especially since the Vapor-X is a highly capable cooler. Apart from that we would have loved to see lower power consumption, but still, if you're looking for on of the fastest Radeon R9 280X graphics cards available then you won't do anything wrong going for this particular card. |
- Enthusiast - Gaming |
||
| We give the Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 280X OC Edition very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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