Sapphire teased new Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX aftermarket graphics cards on its Twitter page just a few hours ago. But these aren’t your ordinary GPUs; these GPUs will be carrying the Vapor-X sub-brand, which we haven’t seen from Sapphire in eight years.
Vapor was one of Sapphire’s higher-up GPU lineups in 2014 and earlier, being the runner-up to its Toxic sub-brand of flagship cards. As the name implies, the Sapphires Vapor and Vapor-X Radeon GPUs featured a vapor chamber cooler design, which at the time was very rare and could be considered an exotic trait among GPU coolers.
Models like the Vapor-X R9 290X packed huge triple fan cooler designs beyond two slots in thickness, which was massive for GPU coolers at the time. It also packed massive power delivery systems and power targets that could be adjusted by a whopping 50% beyond the card’s default power limit (which was probably already boosted beyond the reference design, to begin with).
It’ll be exciting to see how Sapphire treats the Vapor-X brand now that it’s been taken out of retirement for 2022 and beyond. But, of course, a lot has changed over the past 8 to 10 years, including that 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 Vapor-X to stand out, it’ll have to do much more than just feature a vapor chamber cooler. We suspect these cards will be massive, some of Sapphire’s biggest cooler designs to date, and will probably have an enormous power delivery system with dual BIOS chips to match.
But this is just speculation on our end; all we know is that the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will be getting Vapor-X models, and we don’t know if the non-X versions are returning. One thing that does stand out in the teaser video from Sapphire is that the memory and the GPU core are covered in a pure copper baseplate that appears to be a completely separate piece from the graphics card’s heatsink. This suggests the card will feature excellent cooling characteristics, mainly because the baseplate is made out of copper – which is more thermally conductive than other metals.
Another interesting note is that the card also features triple 8-pin power connectors, one step up from the dual 8-pin power connectors we saw on the reference 7900 XTX. Unfortunately, this might confirm that AMD’s Radeon 7000 series GPUs are incompatible with the 16-pin power connector since triple 8-pins are far bulkier than a single 16-pin.
Pricing, availability, and specifications are unknown, but we should expect more details to arrive soon, with the RX 7900 XTX and XT launch date fast approaching.
