By now the world knows that ATI and its partners came out and dropped a bomb on the Nvidia camp with the release of the first DirectX 11 capable video cards, the HD 5800 series, which includes the Sapphire HD 5870 and Sapphire HD 5850. To add insult to injury, they followed up with the HD 5700 series that includes the Sapphire HD 5770 and 5750.The performance of the HD 5800 series scaled well and truly beat up on the GTX 285, which was the reigning top-of-the-line single GPU video card. Its palace at the front of the line is now occupied by the HD 5870. If you have not heard, Sapphire is ATI's largest partner and usually comes up with something unique for its video cards once the BBATI cards are launched. Cooling, as well as construction enhancements, are usually part of the package. In the past there have been the Atomic series, the Toxic series, and the Vapor-X series of cards - each with a specific target. The Vapor-X line uses Sapphire's Vapor Chamber Technology, coupled with an improved cooling solution to have the GPU core and memory run as cool as possible, while attenuating the noise problems with the reference cooling design. By doing this, Sapphire can give the cards a small boost in performance by upping the clock speeds on the memory and GPU core. The first card to use the Vapor-X technology supplied by Microloops was the Sapphire Atomic HD 3870, first seen on OCC back in January of 2007. Since then, the technology has become mature - easily handling all of the cooling needs of the Vapor-X line up.