Introduction

Climates differ depending on the geographical area you live in, but when you live in a climate controlled home, most people maintain a fairly constant temperature year round. Although we would like to think that our climate controlled temperature maintains a constant in every room of the house, it doesn’t. There can be different variables that may cause one room to be cooler than another and it could be how the room is furnished or the amount of electronics running in the room. One electronic component that produces heat is a computer and, depending on where that computer is placed in the room, it can generate heat or be affected by other variables around it, causing it to absorb the hot, ambient air around it. Factors that can cause a computer to absorb more heat than desired are carpeting, small confined spaces and how high it is off the floor.

Most people who are aware that heat can shorten the life of a computer component usually focus on the CPU and will purchase an aftermarket heatsink and fan combination to better cool the CPU. What many people forget to think about is their video card; most take it for granted that excessive heat can also shorten the life of a video card. Cooling a GPU is just as important as cooling a CPU and many times the stock heatsinks that come with many reference models do not cool as efficiently as desired and can tend to be very loud. Usually, within a few weeks of the launch of a new series of video cards, we will start to see manufacturers releasing video cards with their signature heatsinks. Sapphire is one of those manufacturers and their Vapor-X line has proven itself as an efficient and quiet cooling solution since its introduction in 2007 with the 3870 Atomic Edition video card. This was the first of Sapphires video cards to use Vapor- X technology.

The Sapphire Radeon HD5870 and HD5750 are the next line of Sapphire's video cards to receive Vapor-X technology. The Sapphire HD5870 and HD5750 Vapor-X Edition line of video cards also have slightly higher clock speeds than the standard edition of 5000 series video cards in their class.