Sapphire 5770 Vapor X

Many users would love their products to run cooler than stock so they pick up an aftermarket cooler, well now Sapphire has a product just for you, the 5770 Vapor X. The card includes an aftermarket cooler so you can really kick up the clocks.

Introduction

Many of us are always doing whatever we can to get that last MHz out of our equipment. This includes going out and buying an aftermarket cooler to allow us to increase the voltages, or buying a better overclocking motherboard. If you go with an aftermarket cooler for your video card then a few problems arise. First you have to take off the stock cooler then carefully apply the VRM coolers, ect. Why not just buy a card with an aftermarket cooler already installed? The answer to that most of the time is, “But there are no aftermarket cooled cards available.” Today we happen to have an aftermarket cooled 5770 by Sapphire. This card gives you all the advantages of aftermarket cooling without the hassle of installing your own aftermarket cooler.

Of course since this is a 5770 the card also comes with DX11 and Eyefinity. That certainly sounds like a winning formula to me.

Features

The Vapor-X cooling can easily be considered the main selling point with this card. Like the 5970, this 5770 uses a Vapor Chamber which increases the cooling capacity of the cooler.

ATI Eyefinity Technology(A.B.)

40 nm Process Technology

800 Stream Processing Units

Advanced 1GB/128-bit GDDR5 Memory Technology

2nd Generation TeraScale Engine

Microsoft Windows 7® Support(E.)

ATI CrossFireX™ Technology(C.)

Display Flexibility, Supports DL-DVI, DP, HDMI and D-Sub

HDMI 1.3 support with Deep Color and 7.1 High Bitrate Audio

AC-3, AAC3, Dolby® TrueHD and DTSHD Master Audio TM Support

Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology including memory clocks (D.)

ATI Avivo™ Technology Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2)(D.) ATI Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video. Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) DVD Upscaling Dynamic Contrast Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support Support for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 Dual Stream 1080p playback support (H.) DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support

Supports OpenGL 3.2(F.)

3D stereoscopic display/glasses support (G.)

On chip HDCP Support

Everything else here falls into the basic feature list of the 5770 card itself.

Specifications

The stock clocked 5770 is very close to the Vapor-X. I am a little bit disappointed in Sapphire for only giving this card a measly 10 MHz OC on the core clock. This amounts to pretty much nothing in the real world.

Pictures & Impressions

As with just about every other mid range graphics card, this one comes in a paper mache like holder. This material has a little give to it to help absorb any impacts. The heavier included accessories are in a separate pocket. This eliminates the risk of the accessories damaging the card.

Sapphire opted to not include a bunch of unneeded accessories, and instead included everything you need, as well as a couple extras. As always, there is an included manual that will get anyone who is unsure of what there doing going. There is also a driver disk, Crossfire cable, DVI to VGA adapter, and a 6 pin PCIE adapter. Sapphire was kind enough to bundle Dirt 2 (a DX 11 game) in with the card so you can immediately experience DX11 for yourself.

First up is a nice aerial view of the card. We can see that this is clearly far from the reference cooler design. The fan is much larger, which means it is able to run at a higher speed without making as much noise. This helps lower the temperature