Sapphire Vapor X

Sapphire Vapor-X 4850

The card itself is actually quite compact in comparison to other cards with it measuring only 21cm in length.  This allows it to fit comfortably in any ATX case and many MATX cases.

Dominating a large proportion of the graphics card’s blue PCB is the Vapor-X cooler that I explained earlier.  This is gloss black plastic in colour – attracts dust like a magnet – and has two grey stripes down the middle.

The fan which cools the aluminium heatsink below is an 8cm spinner and sports 11 blades. A large amount of airflow from this fan is directly cooling the GPU’s base; a small amount also cools the memory chips below. These memory chips do not have heatsinks due to the height restriction between cooler and chip.

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As you can see from the rear, the Vapor-X cooler is attached by four spring compressed screws.

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From the PCI-e side of the Sapphire 4850 you can see it takes up two PCI bracket slots. The second slot is needed as the hot air from the Vapor-X cooler is extracted from here. In terms of connectors on the primary slot there are:

• VGA
• HDMI
• DVI

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Finally, looking at the other side of the card shows a 6 pin PCI-E Connector and a sapphire symbol on the cooler – this lights up whilst in usage.

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There’s also two crossfire bridge connectors which allows two of these cards to function together; increasing their computational power.

Graphics Cards