A Closer Look

Sapphire's cooler uses a large copper vapor-chamber to soak heat up from the GPU surface. You can also see the thermal pads that cool the memory chips on the front side of the GPU.


Once we remove the main heatsink, you can see two smaller heatsinks that keep voltage-regulation circuitry cool.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power cable for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


The button located near the CrossFire connectors switches between two BIOSes on the card. On other HD 7900 Series cards, this dual BIOS feature only acts as a safeguard against problems during BIOS flashing. On the Sapphire Vapor-X, this feature has been extended to provide a BIOS that runs clocks beyond Sapphire's default clock for the HD 7950without any voltage changes, which will help keep power consumption in check.


For voltage control, the card uses a CHiL CHL8228G, which is a common voltage controller nowadays. It offers software voltage control, comprehensive monitoring features, and is well supported by most overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture. It is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.