Sapphire 4850 Vapour X

Well got mine yesterday


First impressions, good simple box design and the card looks great:
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/h...06-09_0922.jpg
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/h...-09_095701.jpg

However the bundle is a bit lacklustre, on the hexus review it was bundled with powerdvd etc and the one i got came with a simple setup guide and a pcie to molex connector+crossfire
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/h...06-09_0924.jpg
Anyone else bought one and found to have an extremely basic bundle?

Apart from that i believe the card is great because at idle and load its silent, it idles at ~42C with the fan at <20%(auto) and on load (with ati tool) it stays under 70 which is done by the fan spinning at ~38%, the fan is virtually silent at 45 and silent(to me) at <40 so the temps are good aswell as the noise. Its a very hot day so i expect temps to be lower by about 5C during colder days.

Over clocking: Managed to get it to 715Mhz core and 1125Mhz memory up from 625/993(1986), that to me seems quite good considering it uses less power than all other 4850s i was expecting it to be a bit worse

3dmark doesnt seem to work so no benchmarks.

Looks a nice card TBH. I would like one for my Shuttle but ATM I am a tad skint so I will have to stick with my HD4830 with an Akasa Vortexx Neo(not so quiet)! :(

I've always wanted to play with one of these coolers, apparently they are very good. As for the bundle, it seems more and more companies are cutting down on them. I suspect this is down to the economy and need to cut costs.

I personally don't mind, all I want is a VGA/DVI converter and i'm a happy chappy!

Thats weird my neo was next to silent even under pressure. The vapour-x is a superb system. nice card :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dfour

Thats weird my neo was next to silent even under pressure. The vapour-x is a superb system. nice card :)

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I have it in an SD37P2 SFF system which is on the desk right next to me. On the lower fan setting it is quiet but I need to use the maximum fan setting otherwise my HD4830 runs too hot for my liking. In a full sized system I assume the noise would not be so apparent I suppose!

Very happy you got a quiet card. Can you post your system spec please and also can you play games like Crysis with that card?

System specs on the left but ill post anyway.

CPU: e8400(stock currently)
Mobo: P5n-d
Ram: 4gb (2x2) DDR2 ballistic ram pc6400
HDD: 2x 250gb AAKS, 640gb AAKS, 1TB hitachi
GPU: 512mb 4850

Havent tried crysis but i remember reading ati cards didnt do aswell since nvidia pumped alot of money into it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hicks12

System specs on the left but ill post anyway.

CPU: e8400(stock currently)
Mobo: P5n-d
Ram: 4gb (2x2) DDR2 ballistic ram pc6400
HDD: 2x 250gb AAKS, 640gb AAKS, 1TB hitachi
GPU: 512mb 4850

Havent tried crysis but i remember reading ati cards didnt do aswell since nvidia pumped alot of money into it.

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The ATI cards do fine enough in Crysis just make sure you have the latest drivers installed though.

tbh Hicks that's just Sapphire being Sapphire, my Zotac GTX260 came with a Far Cry 2, 3DMark Vantage and quite a number of cables and adaptors (odd since Zotac is the sister company of Sapphire)
Even "cheaper" brand Inno3D had a free game plus a number of cables/adaptors with my 8800GT.

Power Color is another that has a really empty retail box.

Nah its not, i checked on their website and they do 4 different types of bundles and this was the retail lite or something (just comes with the basics) however the "Full version" comes with everything else, maybe thats why novatech were able to make it cheaper than the competition?

That's fairly common, the other one is eairly releases of a "basic" card come with a game to try to tempt more people to buy it, then depending on how well it sells they keep/change the game to try to keep sales or remove it to reduce costs.

nice

It looks a great card!

Whats the prob with 3dmark? If its 3d06, there is an _0906a patch recently released and before that a general futuremark patch (SystemInfo_Hotfix_Feb08_installer) that improves compatibility (basically allows their product to work on 45nm setups, or thats how it was for me!). The 06a patches are quite big but the '08 patch is a couple of MB. Try those if you haven't already?

Heres the best of what I found over the last couple of weeks (in no particular order and maybe in mid review pages):
http://www.sapphiretech.com/presenta...000101&pid=218
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=17690&page=8
http://www.bigbruin.com/content/4850vaporx_8
http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/sap...850/index4.php
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/04...850/page3.html
http://www.xsreviews.co.uk/reviews/g...hire-vapor-x/3

And yes Sapphire are well known for relasing full and lite retail packs, I got caught in the past with tricky advertising and ended up without the juicy extras!

Its not always easy to find on futuremark page, so here are links for benchmarks & patches:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Benchmarks-&-Demo's_c6.html
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Futurema...load-1870.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alex98uk

I've always wanted to play with one of these coolers, apparently they are very good. As for the bundle, it seems more and more companies are cutting down on them. I suspect this is down to the economy and need to cut costs.

I personally don't mind, all I want is a VGA/DVI converter and i'm a happy chappy!

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Generally yes! But this card has a VGA/DSUB connector so probably wont have the DVI converter?