Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+ Vapor-X Review: More Is More

I made fun of the box art on Sapphire's RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure, and I'm happy to say the blue and black artwork on the 7900 XTX is less ugly. Not that it really matters once you unpack the card.

There's plenty of padding around the card to protect it during shipping, plus a support bracket to help prevent card sag and an ARGB cable that can be used to let your motherboard control the card's lighting.

A quick word on the support bracket: It's a bit finicky to install, since it has overlaps on at least one of the screws that holds the graphics card in place. It has three positions for screws, but the width of the 7900 XTX Vapor-X means you'll only use one of them (and perhaps one of the empty IO slots below the card). The good news is that it won't slide around when you're moving the case, but for someone like me that regularly swaps GPUs, it's less convenient.

The card incidentally is quite large. It measures 321 x 134 x 72 mm and weighs 1948g. That's lighter and slightly smaller than most of the third-party RTX 4090 cards we've reviewed of late (see: Asus ROG Strix 4090, Colorful 4090 Vulcan, Gigabyte 4090 Gaming OC, and MSI 4090 Suprim Liquid-X), but not by much — it's also slightly longer and thicker than the 4090 Founders Edition. You'll need 3.25-slots of clearance, though at least there's a triple-slot IO bracket to help support the card.

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Sapphire uses a fairly common triple-fan cooling setup with custom 95mm fans. The blades on these fans are also a new innovation, with an angular design that we're told helps improve airflow and reduce noise levels. The fans also include an integrated rim to improve static pressure and airflow, and finally the center fan spins clockwise while the two outer fans rotate counterclockwise, which reduces turbulence and noise.

Sapphire takes a slightly different approach on the display outputs, with dual HDMI 2.1 and dual DisplayPort 2.1 (54 Gbps). The DP2.1 outputs technically support a slightly higher bandwidth… but only if you have a DP2.1 capable monitor, which are hard to come by. Even our Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32 with its 4K 240 Hz support still uses DP1.4 (with Display Stream Compression for 240 Hz).

Sapphire does use a triple 8-pin power connector design, and part of that is because the Vapor-X is rated for 410W — 55W more than the reference 7900 XTX. As usual, you get greatly diminishing returns for the increased power. We'll hit the numbers in a bit, but the Vapor-X consistently uses about 50W more power, a 15% increase, while performance typically only improves by up to 2%.

Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+ Vapor-X Teardown

Dismantling the Sapphire Vapor-X isn't particularly difficult, though there are a few extra steps. There's a reinforcing frame around the cooling, and the best order of disassembly isn't immediately obvious. I took it apart one way, but realized in the process that it would have been better to take a slightly different approach. The gallery below shows, more or less, how I proceeded, but I'll note where things should diverge.

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The first thing I did was to remove the ten Phillips head screws securing the backplate, but you're perhaps better off removing the top of the metal shroud with the three fans first. That's images five through nine in the above gallery. You'll need an Allen wrench set to do that, I'm not sure of the exact size I used, but it's relatively small, like in the 2mm range.

Being able to get easy access to the fans does have an advantage, as those are one of the most common failure points on graphics cards. Take out the four screws as shown and the top should come off, at which point you'll also want to disconnect the fan and RGB LED cables.

You can proceed with the rest of the teardown from here, starting with the backplate. There's another LED cable connecting the plate to the PCB, so be careful to disconnect that before pulling the plate away.

Next, there are four more (smaller) Phillips head screws on the IO bracket that you'll want to remove. Then there are four more screws that hold on the back pressure plate, two of which have stickers that may or may not void your warranty. Once all of these are out of the way, you should be able to pry the heatsink off the GPU and GDDR6 memory, and the extra heatsink/frame should also come off.

That's about it for the teardown, and you can see the GPU, inductors, VRMs, GDDR6, and other components in the rest of the pictures. Our particular sample uses twelve SK hynix 16Gb (2GB) memory packages labeled "H56G42AS8D X014" that corresponds with the "10.0 GHz" memory listed at the website.

There are 20 relatively large VRMs present, seven of which are LR12 modules and the remaining 13 are LR15. Sapphire appears to be using a 17+3 phase VRM design (though feel free to correct me if I got that wrong).

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