Summer is a time for experiences - the days are longer and usually quite warm. To beat the heat and get out of the house, many of us choose the beach or even a local mall. Believe it or not, where I’m from even the libraries are packed. Yes, it’s a time to have fun and do things you would normally not do, once the leaves begin to change their colors. At the end of these exhausting, sweaty, fun filled days, we all crave one thing and that is cooling down in a comfortable air-conditioned atmosphere while enjoying the banana split you purchased on the way home.
Living in California, I try to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible but there are times that I do stay home and find myself playing video games on my computer. Cooling a home is quite expensive so I set my climate control to a moderate temperature, just to make it comfortable. Unfortunately, these temperatures are higher than what I would normally keep during the fall and winter. Increased ambient temperatures can play havoc on a desktop computer and without the proper cooling to compensate for the difference, components may begin to fail. The two components that generate the most heat are also the ones that require sufficient cooling, the CPU and the GPU (video card). In comparison, I have noticed a 10 degree Celsius increase (idle) on my video card during the summer months. There are solutions to increase the cooling capacity of your video card, such as Liquid or aftermarket heatsink and fans, but they can be quite expensive. To defer that cost, most video card manufacturers offer solutions other than a stock cooler that is found on a reference design. One solution would be a Sapphire Vapor-X Edition Video Card.
The Sapphire HD Radeon 6850 Vapor-X Edition video card is an upgrade from a stock cooled Sapphire Radeon HD 6850. The Sapphire 6850 Vapor-X is overclocked to 800MHz core and 1100MHz memory, compared to the 775MHz core and 1000MHz memory on the reference 6850 video card. In addition, this HD 6850 includes Sapphires patented Vapor-X cooling technology. Onboard is 1GB of GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit interface. The 6850 supports DX 11, AMD Accelerated parallel Processing, AMD Eyefinity, AMD Crossfire, and AMD HD3D. Inputs include a DVI-I, DVI-DL, HDMI 1 .4a, and mini Display Ports.
