Sapphire

Mini Review One small step for a GPU, one giant leap for all kinds of gaming. Is that the message from this uprated 7700-series board?

Mini Review On paper, provides the best bang for your buck. In practice, it's simply too slow for that to matter.

How much video memory do you actually need, and how little can you really expect to get away with on a fairly entry-level graphics card these days?

Can this fairly large slab of silicon and whirry bits shake AMD's unjust reputation for flaky drivers and weak performance?

1GB or 2GB? That is the question

Yep, you've read the name right, Sapphire has plunged into the murky world of third party processor chilling with its Vapor-X CPU cooler.

This far down the pecking order of graphics cards you will really struggle to get anything close to decent gaming frame rates out of a normal 1080p screen.

A reasonably priced and feature-packed motherboard that performs well and shows some intelligent design choices.

Sapphire's Vapor-X HD 7970 aims to push AMD's Graphics Core Next hardware to its very limits by boosting the core and memory clocks, and managing the excess heat with its top-of-the-line air cooling.

Faster, cooler and for only another £13 on top of the price of the vanilla AMD Radeon HD 7870 - why wouldn't you go for the new Sapphire HD 7870 OC Edition?