As the biggest partner for AMD graphics cards Sapphire are no strangers to having to chill out hot bits of silicon, but now they are turning their vapour chamber tech to new use with the release of the Vapor-X CPU cooler .
“We are harnessing our expertise in advanced technologies to deliver better performing products for the enthusiast which will then push down into an expanding product line for the mainstream,” said Adrian Thompson, Sapphire's VP of marketing.
We've had the cooler in our labs for a little while now and the cooling on offer is impressive, as is the blinged-up pair of blue LED fans and detailing. It certainly copes with its enthusiast branding, being able to keep an overclocked Core i7-3770K running at 4.5GHz without having to throttle it back.
A lot of coolers we've played with recently haven't been able to keep below the 100˚C threshold for a chip running at 100% load when overclocked, but the Vapor-X managed to keep things at a steady 88˚C. Now that's still pretty toasty, and did require some noisy fan-based intervention, but it still ran our number-crunching benchmarks reliably.
Sapphire's Vapor-X cooler is also pretty quick at getting the CPU back down to a low temperature when you stop stressing the poor silicon. In fact taking under a minute and a half to get back down to idle temperatures from an overclocked, fully-loaded state, is actually class-leading performance.
At just under £60, it's not a bad price for such a quality little cooler, and well worth a look if you can't stretch to a closed-loop water cooler for your overclocked CPU.
