Vapor Chamber Technology is based on the same principles as heatpipe technology. The Tri-X cooling solution also employs Sapphire's Vapor-X technology.
The heatsink also draws heat away from the memory chips and MOSFETs via thermal pads and an aluminum plate that's soldered to the fins at various points. With densely packed fins in both heatsinks there's plenty of surface area for heat dissipation. The three fans are controlled by the PCB's single fan header, so there's no independent speed adjustment.Ī copper baseplate for the GPU is connected to five heat pipes within the main heatsink two of these loop back on themselves while the remaining three extend out into the secondary heatsink to the side. The Tri-X cooler features three 85mm fans, each with nine blades pushing air over a very large heatsink, which extends beyond the length of the PCB. Sapphire's Tri-X cooling solution is what gives the company the confidence to push its R9 280X so far. Sapphire has matched Gigabyte with an 1100MHz core overclock, while they left the memory at 6000MHz.
Still for that money Sapphire has made plenty of enhancements, which include their Vapor-X technology, Tri-X cooling, black diamond choke, full solid cap design, Dual BIOS and factory overclocking. The Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC R9 280X is the most expensive R9 280X graphics card featured in our roundup, with a retail value of $340.