Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Vapor-X OC 1GB Graphics Card Review

We’re always keen to see what crazy ideas Sapphire come up with as time goes on, and as we said earlier, when graphics cards have been released for a while, it’s up to the GPU manufacturer’s partners to think outside the box and come up with something new and fresh and that’s what led Sapphire on to make the Vapor-X range of cards.

Vapor-X cards are all focussed around the cooler and with a graphics card cooler comes two main areas which are acoustics and temperature. When looking at the acoustics, we were disappointed, yet happy all at the same time, because it gave a mixed result of sorts. While other cards on the market are a lot louder and can sometimes sound as if they are taking off, the Vapor-X 6850 OC is a lot quieter. On that same note, there are other similar based cards that are quieter than the 6850 OC, which leaves it at the higher end of average, but doesn’t leave us thinking that it’s anything special.

The other aspect of a Vapor-X designed card is of course the temperatures and how well it deals with them. At idle, we saw some truly amazing temperatures at 37 degrees, and at load a comfortable 66 degrees isn’t something you can really grumble at. This goes to show that the Vapor-X design does work, and when coupled with a good chassis with sufficient airflow, the results should be slightly better than what you’ve seen here, as we test all of our components on open bed test benches.

Now that the Vapor-X side of things are clear, we can move on to the performance, as that’s why we’re all here anyway, right?

The performance of the card showed some real promising results, with it leading slightly ahead of the VTX3D equivalent through all tests and even stepping in front of the GTX 560Ti at certain points through our benchmarking. This shows some great potential behind the card and with some fantastic results at Eyefinity resolutions, we saw some very close calls when comparing to the 6950 and 6970 and that is a great accomplishment in its own right.

Sadly price wise, we were unable to find any reputable retailers stocking this card in the UK, but we can assure you that these cards are still within the market, and will just involve some extra time searching for them.

To sum things up, you really do get a good performing card as expected from a 6850, and with anything to go by, especially with Sapphire aiming to be competitive in the market, we should see prices at a reasonable level, which is great news considering the added extras that Sapphire bundle in for you, and the fact that it rivals the more expensive GTX 560Ti in certain tests, just goes to show that AMD and Sapphire make a great team and can accomplish great things together.

If wanting a great bang for buck card, that offers strong performance, Eyefinity functionality, a good accessory bundle and a reliable brand behind it all, then you can’t really go wrong with the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Vapor-X OC graphics card.