By now everyone should know about the capabilities of the ATI 5 series video cards. If not you have probably been living under a rock. ATI took a swing for the fences and hit a home run in terms of the performance delivered by the Sapphire HD 5870 when compared to the best single GPU card that Nvidiahad to offer at the time, the GTX 285. The follow up the Sapphire HD 5850 just about cleaned house as well. Building on that performance lead they solidified the high end stranglehold with the Sapphire HD 5970 that really just crushed the GTX 295 and HD 4870x2. With the high end covered the mid range was not forgotten about with the introduction of the 5700 series that included the Sapphire HD 5770 and 5750. The 5 series of cards are the first true Direct X 11 video cards to market but at launch really did not have any games ready to show off this technology. This has now changed with more than a few games ready with many more in the wings from a slew of developers. Sapphire as ATIs largest partner always brings something interesting to the table after the release of the reference or BBATI cards. Sapphire has a few lines that are geared more towards the enthusiast with the Atomic, Toxic and Vapor-X series. Each offers better component usage and some innovative cooling solutions. For instance there was the use of a self contained liquid cooling system on the Sapphire HD 4870x2 Atomic and the first use of the Vapor-X technology from Microloops on the Sapphire HD 3870 Atomic back in January 2008.From that point forward Sapphire has made use of the technology not only on the Vapor-X line but in the Toxic and Atomic lineups to bring out the best cooling and noise performance from their video cards. The cooling is only part of the Vapor-X package. The Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X comes equipped with not only the additional cooling but is built using solid high polymer capacitors and"Black Diamond" chokes that use a built in heat spreader to drop the operating temperatures by 10% while increasing the efficiency by 25%. So what does this really get you net? Because if the cooling used Sapphire ups the clock speed by 10Mhz on the Juniper 40nm core going from 850MHz to 860MHz but no increase on the GDDR5 memory clocks. At this point you have a card with better cooling, better component selection and higher clock speeds. lets see if that translates in to better performance and overclocking. If the past history is any indication this card should do well.