Sapphire did a mighty good job with their HD 7770 Vapor-X. Even though Vapor-X was engineered for high-end cards, the company's exclusive cooling technology can really show its potential on this lower-midrange card. Combined with the factory overclock, the card delivers a well rounded package for the budget conscious gamer. Thanks to the large overclock out of the box, the card is 8% faster than AMD's reference design, which puts the Vapor-X on the same level as the HD 6850. This makes the card a great choice for medium-res gaming, up to, including 1680x1050.
Our testing shows outstanding noise characteristics for the cooler. In any system that has other actively cooled components the card will be inaudible in both idle and load. Thanks to Sapphire's cooling solution the card doesn't run hot either. Temperatures are comfortably low, with plenty of headroom for overclocking. This is actually the first HD 7770, that we tested, that gets well over 1200 MHz GPU clock with manual tweaking. Other HD 7770 cards typically end up in the mid-1100 MHz range. Memory overclocking reaches a bit more than 1500 MHz, which is ok, but not as high as other HD 7770 cards. It seems Sapphire's choice for Elpida memory chips ate into memory overclocking headroom, but with the high GPU overclock in mind, I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.
Overall Sapphire's card is about as good as it gets when considering the HD 7770 only. The price premium of $20 is reasonable, the included HDMI cable helps offset the cost. The biggest issue I see with this card is that it can not compete with the last generation HD 6870 in terms of price/performance. At this time the HD 6870 costs the same as the Vapor-X, yet is 21% faster - a significant difference. In some games it will end up being the needed performance increase required for fluid HD gaming. Nevertheless, if you are in the market for a HD 7770 then the Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X should definitely be one of the first cards to consider.