Introduction:
Like any other AiB, Sapphire has to bend its crosshairs around the latest chipsets to be delivered from AMD, and hope that the ATi genes are able to match up with the current gen nVidia offering. In a market where the majority of its competitors are running with both nVidia and AMD, Sapphire holds fast to its loyal stance alongside AMD. This close-knit relationship between the worlds largest AiB and the industries microprocessor underdog yields Sapphire the opportunity to stretch its innovative muscle in a manner of speaking, and possibly illustrated in the Sapphire ATOMIC HD3870.
Focusing its entire creative engineering prowess on producing AMD based solutions has afforded Sapphire the edge many times in the past, as with the industry pioneering “ULTIMATE” edition. If you recall, the Sapphire ULTIMATE edition was the first performance part to be released from the manufacturer completely passive. Of course this was way back in the day. I mean we are talking 9700 PRO days. Following the ULTIMATE came the “TOXIC” editions which pushed the bar for stock performance from AMD based AiB’s even higher. This time around Sapphire has pulled out the blocks and is trying to make a play for an entire new lifestyle brand to pin to the already well established Sapphire brand. Can they pull it off? Well that is up to you to decide.
The Sapphire flavor of their HD3870 brings with it all of the standard fanfare of the vanilla HD3870 but bakes in a little something above and beyond in addition. In contrast to the competitors’ offerings with their standard HD 3870's, Sapphire's approach is different in what they wanted to achieve for the maiden voyage of the ATOMIC line. The HD 3870 boasts more than just a tweaked look to it, in addition the ATOMIC solution showcases a new thermal technology dubbed Vapor-X.
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Introducing the X Factor: ATOMIC Vapor-X
The Atomic HD 3870 comes with a thinner profile than before using a Vapor-X single slot thermal solution. This addresses the needs of gamers and enthusiasts alike for the hunger slam multiple video cards in a system using CrossFireX technology, without taking up a lot of space. Due to higher clock frequencies, dual slot thermal solutions have plagued small ATX case solutions for years. Now we stand on the cusp of three or four cards daisy-chained together being a technological and financial possibility with CrossFireX. So how does Vapor-X allow for the use of smaller profile cooler while not limiting the core and memory tweakabiltiy?
The Vapor-X vapor chamber uses a five layer design to achieve greater cooling gains than before. The new cooler consists of: a Lower Cover, Transportation Wick, Vaporization Wick, Condensation Wick and an upper cover to seal it all together in a upgraded cooling solution. The heat source heats the vaporization wicks, working fluid is easily vaporized because of the low air pressure inside the cooler. Water vapor then moves into the sealed vacuum chamber where it meets the condensing wick and turns back into a liquid state. At which time the liquid is absorbed by the transportation wick by capillary action and moved back towards the vaporization wick. The liquid is in a recycled state at this time and reheated and re-vaporized by the vaporization wick and repeated again. This is how the new Vapor-X cooling solution on the Atomic HD 3870 series video card works in a nutshell. Still breathing or have your eyes rolled completely back into your head?
Vapor-X has advantages over devices like heat-pipes since they are unidirectional, and Vapor-X is Omni-directional. There is lower thermal resistance over using copper, by up to 50% less. Vapor-X also has a higher heat conductivity that allows for it to work twice as fast as copper solutions. Everyone that uses video cards in the gaming and enthusiasts arena's has long known that copper is the gold standard among coolers because of their conductivity properties. Now Vapor-X enters that arena and sets the standard even higher among video card thermal solutions. Our experience has been quite convincing but as this is not a review we will hold comment any further. Before we jump to having a look at how convincing the overall performance of the ATOMIC HD3870 has proven, lets first take a step back and look at how the core tech of the HD3870 bests the previous gen HD 2900XT.
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Next Gen Justification: Differences between the 2900XT and the HD 3870
When the 2900XT came out it was a fast performing video card, with a few downsides to it that were publically discussed, namely power consumption. Power consumption was a main concern for most gamers using the 2900XT, but AMD has addressed this issue with HD3870 by cutting the Max Power Draw nearly in half of what the HD 2900XT demanded. Another area of discussion was the lack of GDDR4 support or the huge expense it would tack on at the time. Now we see GDDR4 standard on the HD 3870. Building off of the AMD performance jump to GDDR4 we note that the ATOMIC even goes a bit further, with its commitment to tweakage, by increasing the memory clock speeds to an effective 2.4GHz. There are a lot of gains for the HD 3870 over the 2900XT with very little downsides between the two video cards. The Max Power Draw of the HD 3870 was cut in half of that of the 2900XT to address power concerns from the consumer.
