sapphire just hours ago hinted at new Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX aftermarket graphics cards on its Twitter page. But these are no ordinary GPUs. These GPUs will feature the Vapor-X sub-brand, which has not been seen from Sapphire for eight years.
The Vapor was one of Sapphire’s top GPU lineups prior to 2014, runner-up to its Toxic sub-brand of flagship cards. As their names suggest, the Sapphires Vapor and Vapor-X Radeon GPUs featured a vapor chamber cooler design that could be considered a highly unusual and exotic feature for GPU coolers at the time.
Models like the Vapor-X R9 290X have packed a huge triple-fan cooler design that’s over two slots thick. This was huge for GPU coolers at the time. It also packs in an extensive power delivery system and a power target that can be adjusted to 50% over the card’s default power limit (probably already boosted beyond the reference design).
It will be exciting to see how Sapphire handles the Vapor-X brand now that its post-2022 retirement has been lifted. For example, many cards now use vapor chamber coolers, including some of Nvidia’s own Founder Edition cooler designs.
VAPOR-X IS BACK!..#RX7900XTX #RX7900XT #RX7900 #RX7900Series #hardware #teaser #NITRO #AMD #Radeon #SAPPHIRETech pic.twitter.com/wNt7ehxruvDecember 1, 2022
If Sapphire wants the Vapor-X to stand out, simply including a vapor chamber cooler isn’t enough. These cards are massive, supposedly part of Sapphire’s coolest design yet, with a massive power delivery system with dual BIOS chips to match.
But this is just our guess. All we know is that the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will get his Vapor-X model, we don’t know if the non-X version will come back. One thing that stands out in Sapphire’s teaser video is that the memory and GPU cores are covered by a solid copper baseplate that looks like a completely separate piece from the graphics card’s heatsink. This suggests that the card has excellent cooling properties, mainly because the baseplate is made of copper, which has a higher thermal conductivity than other metals.
Another interesting thing is that the card also features a triple 8-pin power connector, a step up from the dual 8-pin power connectors we saw on the reference 7900 XTX. series GPU is not compatible with the 16-pin power connector. A triple 8 pin is much bulkier than a single 16 pin.
Pricing, availability and specs are unknown, but with the RX 7900 XTX and XT launch dates fast approaching, more details will be announced soon.
