14 DAY TRIAL // Normally, when it comes to graphics cards, it's not that easy to factory overclock them too much, especially when you still need to rely on air cooling. Sapphire still managed to do it though.
Not by too much, since the card can't exactly go too far beyond 1000 MHz due to its thermal envelope, power consumption and GPU limits (high though they are).
Still, a boost of 80 MHz is a lot better than nothing, even if it's not the first time I've seen it applied to this particular card, namely the Radeon R9 290X.
The board is already AMD's top single-GPU adapter, but Sapphire felt the 1000 MHz clock wasn't enough, so it pushed it to 1080 MHz instead.
As for the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, usually they operate at 5 GHz, but the Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC card works at 5.46 GHz instead.
Sapphire had to implement a new VRM engine and Dual BIOS, as well as higher-quality components (capacitors, chokes and the like) in order to ensure that the board was not just stable, but also capable of recovering if you manually overclocked it too much.
Sales of the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X OC should start soon enough for a price a bit higher than the regular $590 / €590.
