This article is more than 1 year old
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X 1GB
Very fast, very quiet
The main strength of the Sapphire Vapor-X lies in its unique cooling package. The Vapor-X hardware is fairly slender yet it manages to keep the 4890 cool whilst making almost no noise. We were bowled over when we reviewed the Vapor-X HD 4850, but the Vapor-X HD 4890 is even more impressive as it has to cope with an extra 50W of power compared to the HD 4850.
The extraordinary thing is that the extra power appears to have no effect whatsoever as the new Vapor-X seems just as quiet as the previous model. We are forced to rely on memory as the HD 4850 was reclaimed by Sapphire many months ago.
Far Cry 2 Framerate Results
1920 x 1080, Ultra High Quality, No Anti-Aliasing
Longer bars are better
1920 x 1080, Ultra High Quality, 2x Anti-Aliasing
Longer bars are better
We used a Core i7 system based on an Intel DX58SO motherboard which has a passively cooled chipset. Our CPU cooler was the Akasa Nero that won our recent Core i7 cooler round-up. This combination of CPU cooler, motherboard and graphics card is effectively silent in operation even though the PC offers a prodigious amount of gaming grunt.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
