Sapphire Pure Crossfire PC-A9RD480 Motherboard Review
Sapphire Pure Crossfire PC-A9RD480 Motherboard Review
Sapphire has been ATI’s primary European board partner for their video card line up for a number of years now, so it was of little surprise that they were also one of the first manufacturers to offer motherboards based on ATi’s new enthusiast chipsets. The Pure crossfire is backed up by a less expensive sibling, the Advantage edition, which features a slightly different layout, far fewer overclocking options and no support for SATA2. Given the inclusion of a number of other high-end motherboards in this group test, we elected to look at the better of the two boards – the straight “pure performance” edition. Decked out in a navy blue PCB, the Pure Crossfire motherboard is very aesthetically pleasing. In terms of feature set, it is rather similar to the DFI, but has some subtle but sensible differences.
Like the DFI, the Sapphire board uses the ATi SB450 Southbridge, which is somewhat limiting in that it offers no native SATA 2 and rather slow USB performance. Whilst nVIDIA’s PR department has had a field day pointing this out to enthusiast websites, the likeliness that you will actually notice this performance reduction in every day use is remote. The only situation in which I can see it happening is if you were to transfer a huge amount of data via USB2.0 to an external RAID-0 hard drive. Since you would be making a far better purchasing decision to buy a Firewire external hard drive in the first place, this shouldn’t really affect your motherboard choice. Unlike the DFI, Sapphire has wisely included the Silicon Image 3132 SATA 2 chip as a secondary storage controller on the PC-A9RD480. This has been shown in several tests to be the fastest SATA2 controller out there, besting even the nForce 4 and ULi in terms of performance. On paper, this makes the Sapphire the fastest SATA2 performing board in this group test, which explains its excellent performance in our benchmarks.
You shouldn’t let Sapphire’s relative inexperience in making Motherboards put you off, as this product has a comprehensive BIOS brimming over with overclocking options. As it uses a Phoenix AwardBios, everything is easy to find, with the overclocking options helpfully placed in the “Overclocking Features” section. Within this you can alter clock speeds, voltages and memory timings. As with the DFI, memory voltage can be selected up to a mammoth 4V. The CPU voltage is also highly impressive, offering up to 2.16V (don’t try that at home without a Vapochill). In our testing, the Sapphire was a mighty overclocker, falling just a touch behind the DFI. When you consider that the DFI is almost 50% more expensive however, the PC-A9RD480 is all the more impressive.
As with the DFI, the Sapphire board uses Azalia High Definition audio, which is leagues ahead of the AC97 found on nVIDIA chipset boards, and comparable to Intel’s excellent HD solution. Unlike the Asus A8R-MVP motherboard, the Sapphire uses a Marvell PCIe solution rather than PCI, and this provides a large increase in maximum performance. Whilst you would only ever notice this on very large file transfers over two PCIe Gigabit networks, this could be an important consideration for some users.
Overall the Sapphire is one of the best RD480 motherboards available, both in features and in performance. With RD580 solutions now available this model has been somewhat superseded, but if you can find it at a reduced price, it’s a truly cracking product.
