Introduction
Looking at the Radeon HD 5800-series, AMD and its partners have been able to keep prices high for the simple reason that NVIDIA does not have a range of DX11 GPUs in the market place. Rather, we will need to wait until the Fermi architecture is made available in Q1 2010.
Whilst AMD has a commanding time-to-market lead for DX11 hardware, stock of Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 has been patchy, to say the least.
In an interesting move, Sapphire is launching a pre-overclocked version of the hard-to-find HD 5870. Dubbed Vapor-X, it's a path that AMD's largest AIB has trodden many times before.
Is it worth forgetting about the reference card and opting for a Sapphire-cooled model? Read on to find out.
