Benchmarks: Core i7-3770K at 3.5GHz
That's a surprise. Sapphire's Vapor-X is comfortably better than the Intel reference solution, but it's some way off the pace compared to numerous other coolers. We actually managed to record lower temperatures with the engineering sample we had a couple of months ago.
It's difficult to tell why cooling performance isn't quite as good as we'd hoped, but we suspect a few elements are coming into play. Sapphire's fan profile isn't particularly aggressive (the fans tend to keep quiet, which we actually like) and the bundled thermal paste isn't great. For experimentation's sake, we re-seated the cooler using a different thermal interface that we happened to have lying around and under-load temperature was reduced by a further 3-5°C.
