Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X
Temperatures & Overclocking
The obvious selling point of the Vapor-X card is its cooler and ability to keep temperatures down. Accordingly, the temperature results are shows below.
As you can see, the 4890 Vapor-X does not disappoint in this regard, posting temperatures of approximately 61°C idle / 79°C load. While the idle temperature isn’t terribly great, the load temperature is. You can see the "temperature compression" on the graph, illustrating a very low difference (Delta), only rising 18°C at load, while the other cards exhibit much greater rise in temperatures. Even with the higher clock speeds, the heatsink and fan on the 4890 Vapor-X are doing an excellent job in keeping the card cool. Clearly the Vapor-X technology is effective and successful in its claims.
A quick word about temperatures as it relates to noise: when the fan is left at Auto setting, the temperatures don’t get terribly high and the fan stays very quiet. However, when loads is applied and the fan ramps up, there is barely a discernible difference until the fan is above 75% speed. Even then, the noise is not offensive at all, certainly nothing like the extreme noise produced by the stock 4870 fan which sounds like a hair dryer. The larger, single fan design here on the Vapor-X is very effective in reducing noise and lower temperatures at the same time.
On the subject of overclocking, ATI’s Catalyst Control Center was used, along with GPU-Z and FurMark for stability testing. The 55nm core on the 4890 Vapor-X is already overclocked out of the box by Sapphire (up from 850MHz core and 975MHz memory), and we were able to achieve a final stable overclock of 965MHz Core and 1100MHz Memory (2200MHz effective).
This represents an 11% increase on the core (13% above stock) and 5% increase on the memory (13% above stock). This is a good result, not spectacular, but a 13% ultimate overclock on both the core and memory from stock settings is nothing to scoff at.
