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Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Vapor-X 512MB: last throw of the RV770 dice

by Tarinder Sandhu on 20 March 2009, 13:26 3.5

Tags: Radeon HD 4850 512MB Vapor-X, Sapphire, PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qari2

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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.