A Closer Look

The cooler is exactly the same as on the Sapphire HD 3870 Atomic, see the review for a more detailed dissection and more info about Vapor-X. Inside the baseplate you will find a number of capillary heatpipes which help to spread and transfer the heat away from the GPU to the cooling fins.


Of course this card is compatible with CrossFire. You can mix any RV670 based card with it. From Catalyst 8.3 on CrossFireX is also supported which allows you to run triple and quad CrossFire configurations. Please note that the slowest card will decide the total clock speed of your setup.


The power connector on the back is required to supply power to the card. It is also required when running in PCI-E 2.0 mode, which would be able to supply all power over the bus.


The memory Sapphire uses is the fastest GDDR4 blend you can find on video cards today. The Samsung K4U52324QE-BC08 come with 0.8 ns latency which means they should be good for 1200 MHz - our board even managed more than that.


The heart of the graphics card is this AMD Radeon RV670 graphics processor which is made at TSMC in a 55nm process.