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Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
Date: July 29th, 2005
Topic: Motherboard
Manufacturer: Sapphire
Author: Wesley Fink
 
 

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance

Gaming Performance


If you keep in mind that the orange bar represents the same NVIDIA 6800 Ultra used to test the other boards in this review, you can clearly see that the Sapphire ATI is at or near the top in most game tests. The Sapphire ATI chipset performs at least as fast as the best of nForce4 chipset boards. This is a significant accomplishment for ATI, since there are no glaring performance weaknesses that would tilt the buying decision to a competitor's board.

You can also see that the Sapphire ATI performs very well when driving an NVIDIA 7800GTX video card. You may be surprised to see such a relatively small advantage for the 7800GTX in many of our gaming benchmarks, but that is a result of screen resolution. We run all benchmarks at 1280x1024, which is the highest resolution available on the most used 19" and smaller flat panels. The 7800GTX pulls away only when all the eye candy is turned on or at even higher resolutions. The point of this is that unless you have a 20" or larger LCD (or you're happy with a high-res CRT), the 7800GTX may be a wasted expense that will bring you little additional performance for what the added cost.

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52 Comments - Last by RobFDB, 1654 days ago
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PI-A9RX480 by IRQ Conflict, 1656 days ago
WOOT! been waiting a long time for this board! dissapoints me that there doesn't appear to be a version with the x300 IGP though.

Reply
by IRQ Conflict, 1656 days ago
I was just at ATI's site and they list this as the PI-A8XRX480. Someone have thier wires crossfired? ;)

Reply
mATX by dlamblin, 1656 days ago
Did I miss the mention in the article? Is this an ATX or an mATX board. I'm guessing the former, but it wouldn't be out of place to list the fact along side the rest.

Reply
RE: mATX by erwos, 1656 days ago
It's ATX. If it has more than four slots, it's too big to fit the mATX standard.

Reply
CAPS by erwos, 1656 days ago
"[AMD] Enthusiast" is written with a capital E in the article, and it should not be, since it's not a proper noun. Please fix this error, because it looks grossly unprofessional to anyone with a reasonable command of the written word.

Reply
RE: CAPS by RobFDB, 1656 days ago
Really though, get over it. It doesnt matter in the slightest if we're being honest here. Anyway back to more important matters.

I'm really happy that ATI have managed to bring a top performing board aimed at enthusiasts to market. I was also extremely impressed to see Sapphire implement 4v for the RAM. One issue that i'd like to see investigated is wether the cold boot issue that affects DFI NF4 boards using OCZ VX mem @ high voltages affects the Sapphire board too. Aside from that this is a very impressive showing from ATI. One last thing. I have a x850XT PE and i'm not sure if that can be used as a slave card when ATI bring out the R520. If so that would make a very attractive upgrade.

Reply
RE: CAPS by rjm55, 1656 days ago
The X850XT PE works fine as a slave with the X850 Master Card. In demos at Computex, ATI was showing an X850 Master with an X850XT PE slave.

Reply
RE: CAPS by Jojo7, 1656 days ago
This isn't exactly true. Ati distributed a special driver that SIMULATED crossfire. The actual cards were really just 2 identical x850xtpe's. Though, one probably had an altered bios to simulate a master card.

Read it for yourself: http://anandtech.com/weblog/default.aspx?bid=231

Reply
decent onboard audio at last! by jab98, 1656 days ago
Nice to finally see a amd64 board with decent quality onboard audio, wonder if anyone will revise their nf4 boards to support the better codcec?

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RE: decent onboard audio at last! by jab98, 1656 days ago
*codec

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