Sapphire's Vapor-X takes its graphics card cooling tech to the CPU

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.

Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.