The special sauce
The Vapor-X model is Sapphire's first foray from the reference card that's become ubiquitous of late. The company claims that this cooler is able to keep the underlying GPU 9°C cooler than the basic model. We'll put that to the test, of course.
If you forgive the egregiously bad pun, the cooler looks pretty 'cool' and scores highly on aesthetic appeal.
Sapphire wants to undertake minimal testing/yield work, it seems, as the Vapor-X is clocked in at 860MHz engine and 4,800MHz memory. This represents an overclock on the engine alone, and one that's just 10MHz above default.
Users will need to overclock the card themselves for better-than-reference gaming performance, obviously.
Unlike the Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X, the HD 5770's cooler is near-silent in 2D and still very quiet when running games. The aural difference between it and the reference card is noticeable, easily, when firing up Crysis, so folk looking for a quiet gaming PC will do well to put this on the shortlist.
There's nothing really new apart from the cooler. The Vapor-X ships with the same 1,024MB of GDDR5 memory and PCB as the original. The package is marginally shorter, thanks to not having the cooling 'vents' on the front.
It's still a double-height card, and we're unlikely to see any single-slot, pre-overclocked models soon.
The connectivity mojo is kept intact, too, so you have AMD's Eyefinity support through DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI.
Clearly, the draw here is the quieter cooler. We expect the card to etail for around £130 - a £15 premium over Sapphire's own HD 5770 - and whether it's worth it depends upon your predilection for quietness.
