Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X 3GB video card is a custom card that was designed to appeal to gamers. The performance on this card is stellar and we found it to be more than enough to run game titles at 1920×1080 with all the image quality settings cranked up. This is the most common resolution for gamers today and this card will easily handle all those pixels and keep you gaming smoothly.

Having the EZ Boost button was nice as it gives you an easy way to raise the cards base clock from 850MHz to 950MHz as we did in our review today. If you want to bump up performance even more you can always overclock the card manually. We used AMD OverDrive in CCC and maxed out the utility at 1100MHz core and 1575MHz memory. This is a very impressive overclock for no voltage increase and thanks to the custom cooler we only saw the temperatures and noise rise a little bit! Performance in both games and synthetic benchmarks shot up ~25% with this overclock, so overclocking is certainly worth trying out if you want more performance! For those that want to push the boundaries even further we used the Sapphire TriXX overclocking utility and were able to max this card out at 1150MHz on the core and 1600MHz on the memory (6400MHz effective). That is pretty darn impressive for not having to increase the voltage of the card and we can only hope that all Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X retail cards do this well.

Speaking of the GPU cooler, we loved the Vapor-X GPU cooler as it kept the card nice and cool. We were impressed that during gaming we never hit more than 56C on the GPU. Even with the card overclocked to 1.1GHz on the core we were only running at 60C on the GPU! This cooler was so good that we were able to leave the fans on auto! Usually when you overclock you have to manually increase the fan speeds, but that actually wasn’t needed on this video card.

The Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X comes backed by a two year hardware warranty and was found to be a very well balanced video card. There really isn’t anything to change on the card as it did well across the board in all of our testing. If you are in the market for a $310 video card be sure to give the Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X a look!

Legit Bottom Line: The AMD Radeon HD 7950 was a solid card when it was released, but the Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X shows the full potential of this GPU!