Sapphire might not significantly overclock its Vapor-X cards, but they do a great job in preparing them for such tasks. Quality power components are important prerequisites for stable overclocking and on the HD5770 Vapor-X, Sapphire used Black Diamond chokes, which are cooler and more efficient than standard ones. Thanks to reliable power combined with Vapor-X’s low temperatures, the card didn’t flinch when we moved the slider to push the card to the max in Catalyst Overdrive. The memory ran stable at 1440MHz, and this overclock brought about 7% improvement in FarCry 2.

The fan on Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X card is almost inaudible in 2D and while it gets louder in 3D mode, it’s only slightly louder than in 2D. RPM is automatically regulated and the maximum temperature we recorded was 78°C. Idle temperatures hang around 36°C. Of course, if you’re willing to sacrifice some silence, you can increase the fan RPM and further drop the GPU temperature by more than 10°C.
Compared to the HD 4870 in this respect, Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X clearly takes the cake, as the former card easily hits up to 95°C and the fan is too loud.

The HD 4870 1GB card, which overall did score slightly better, caused our system to draw up to 310W, whereas the same rig with Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X 1GB drew up to 254W. Idle operation with HD 5770 Vapor-X resulted in consumption at about 156W, whereas the HD 4870 with its lack of efficient power management resulted in system consumption of 192W.