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Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB Test Methodology: To test the Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X, we used the same test bed as the 4890 Toxic and Atomic, as well as the same tests. We will also take a long look at the overclocking capabilities of the Vapor-X.
Here is a recap of our tests:
Overclocking: One particular problem that can be caused by adding more memory to a video card is the potential that it may hurt overclocking. Oftentimes, this is why some people will still opt for cards with less memory, especially if it is shown that the extra memory is not particularly helpful in improving performance. Of course, if a manufacturer can effectively bin the memory such that we can get the best of both worlds in clocks and capacity, well, who can argue with that? Initially, we like to start with ATI's Auto-Tune, in order to see how close it really gets us to the real stable clocks. We used the latest and greatest Catalyst drivers, this being the 9.7. These drivers are a bit special, as they also have full Windows 7 support, which means the graphical layout has had a major overhaul. The Auto-Tune utility settled in at a clock of 975MHz on the core, and 1050MHz on the memory. While a decent clock on the core, I was surprised that Auto-Tune found no headroom on the memory whatsoever. Of course, I had to take things into my own hands and see how accurate that really is. What I found was the maximum clock on the core I could get stable was 940MHz, while on memory, I was able to max it out at 1200MHz. While Auto-Tune has been very close for us in the past, in this case it really didn't get us all that close. I guess that's not really a bad thing, because that means we got ourselves one heck of a memory clock. As for the Vapor-X cooling, with the fan at 100%, we peaked at 70C, essentially identical to the Atomic and Toxic editions.
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