Temperatures, and power-draw
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Beating the reference-cooled Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB handsomely, the Vapor-X cooling does a decent job in keeping the HD 4850 cool under load. Trouble is, XFX's also-custom-cooled Radeon HD 4850 XXX 512MB does a similar job but ships with pre-overclocked frequencies and a lower street price.
Power-draw
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Radeon HD 4850s pull just under 200W on our testbed, and the Sapphire card's idle power-draw, evaluated with respect to the complete system, is considerably lower than the pre-overclocked XFX's, lending some credence to Sapphire's power-efficiency claims.