[W1zzard]

Introduction

I would like to thank Sapphire for supplying the tested motherboard.

Sapphire is well known to everybody for making top-notch ATI video cards. Recently they introduced a whole range of motherboard products based on ATI's chipsets. The latest addition to this lineup is the PI-A9RD480. It supports two ATI video cards running in CrossFire for an even smoother gaming experience.

Sapphire's naming scheme works like this:


The chipset in use is the ATI RD480. It offers the same features as the other Rx480 chipsets and additionally support for CrossFire.

Sapphire is making the PURE motherboards with enthusiasts and gamers in mind, so we can expect some good overclocking features from this board.

Features

Sapphire PURE Crossfire PC-A9RD480
Processor	AMD Athlon64 / FX Socket 939
FSB	800 MHz / 1000+ MHz
Chipset	ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 (RD480 + SB450)
Memory	4x 184 Pin DDR, Dual Channel DDR266/333/400, up to 4 GB
BIOS	AwardBios
Slots	2x PCI-E (x16 with 1 slot, x8 with both slots active) 2x PCI
HDD Connectivity	2x ATA-133 4x SATA, 2x SATA-II
Networking	10/100/1000 Mbps - Marvell 88E852 via PCI-Express
Ports	8x USB 2.0 (4 on Back Panel) 2x IEEE1394 (1 on Back Panel)
Audio	8 Channel Realtek ALC880 Audio, SPDIF
Form Factor	ATX 305 x 244mm

Specifications from Sapphire

Chipset

• ATI RD480 x SB450 Chipset

Processor

• Support for AMD K8 Processor in Socket939 package
• Support Hypertransport Interface bus

VRM (Voltage Regulator Modules) on Board

• Flexible motherboard design with on board VRM, easy to upgrade with future AMD K8 processors
• 0.800V to 1.55V in 25 mV steps

System Memory

• A total of four 184-pin DDR RAM sockets
• DIMM size support from 64MB to 2GB
• Support of dual channel 128-bit wide memory interface
• Support of 266/333/400 DDR RAM memory type

System BIOS

• PnP, APM, ATAPI and Windows 2000/XP
• Full support of ACPI & DMI
• Auto detects and supports LBA harddisks with capacities over 160GB
• Easy to upgrade BIOS

Plug and Play

• Supports Plug and Play specification 1.1
• Plug and Play for Windows 2000 and XP
• Fully assignable PCI interrupts

Onboard I/O

• Onboard two PCI fast IDE ports supporting up to four ATA, ATA2, Ultra ATA33/66/100/133 IDE HDDs, CD-Roms, ZIP drives and LS-120 drives as boot drive
• One floppy port supports two FDD of 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB and 2.88MB capacity
• Eight USB ports (four ports via two headers)
• PS/2 keyboard connector
• PS/2 mouse connector
• One front panel sound connector

Extended USB Support

• Includes 2 OHCI host controllers, increasing the number of external ports to eight
• Includes 1 OHCI USB2.0 host controller that supports all eight ports (Bandwidth shared between eight ports)
• This motherboard supports USB 2.0 feature only on Windows 2000 (with SP4 or above) and XP (with SP1 or above) OS.

Onboard Marvell 88E8052 PCI Express Gigabit LAN

• Full compliance with IEEE 802.3u 100 Base-T specifications and IEEE 802.3X Full Duplex Flow Control
• Supports 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s operation
• Supports Wake-On-LAN function and remote wake-up

PCI Express x16 Graphics Interface

• Two 16-lane (x16 port) PCI Express port intended for external graphics
• ATI CrossFire Dual Graphic Card Supported
• Full compliant to the PCI Express Base Specification Revision 11.0a
• The base PCI Express frequency of this interface is 4 GB/s
• PCI Express supports an enhanced addressing mechanism
• An optional ADD2 card can utilize PCI Express Graphics x16 connection

Power Management

• Supports SMM, APM and ACPI
• Break switch for instant suspend/resume on system operations
• Energy star "Green PC" compliant
• Hardware monitoring circuit is supported, provide voltage, fan speed etc. monitoring
• Wake-On-LAN (WOL) support
• Supports Suspend-To-RAM (STR)

Onboard ALC880 7.1 audio

• Integrated Realtek ALC880 controller
• Fully Sound and Sound Blaster compatible
• Full-Duplex 4 24-bit two-channel DACs and 3 stereo 20-bit ADCs
• PnP and APM 1.2 support
• Windows 2000/XP drivers ready
• Line-In, Line-out, Mic-in, SPDIF-in, SPDIF-out
• Supports ALC880 codec for eight channel sound output

Onboard IEEE1394

• Compliant with IEEE1394 OHCI specifications v1.0 and v1.1
• Integrated 400Mb 2-port PHY

Onboard Serial ATA Host Controller

• Independent DMA operation on four ports
• Data transfer rates of 150 MB/s
• RAID 0/1 feature support

Onboard Serial ATA-II Host Controller

• Independant DMA operation on four ports
• Data transfer rates of 300 MB/s
• RAID 0/1 feature support

Expansion Slots

• 2 PCI Express x16 slot
• 2 PCI slots - ver. 2.2 compliant

Packaging

The package with its reflective color and window design will sure stand out on retailer shelves.


On the back of the box is a description of the motherboard and specifications.


When you open the front cover you can see the pretty white motherboard in the box.


Inside the box, under the motherboard you have manuals and accessories well arranged.

Contents

You will receive:

• Motherboard
• Users Manual, Sapphire Sticker
• 1x IDE Cable, 1x Floppy Cable, 1x SATA Cable
• Bracket for IEEE1394
• IO Shield
• Driver CD, Application CD

Not really a big accessory package, but everything the average user needs is there - maybe a SATA power adapter is missing. But most PSUs nowadays come with SATA connectors. The English manual is excellent and goes well into detail of the BIOS settings.

Board Layout

Click here for a 3000x2500 high-res shot of the board (3 MB download), the backside is here.


Space around the CPU socket is more than enough for most users.


The PI-A9RD480 is based on a common motherboard design which includes on-board video. Since Sapphire does not use this, the IO panel has empty space where the VGA connectors would be. Fitting small fans in there shouldn't be a problem for people who like to mod their stuff and so get better airflow over the CPU power circuitry.
From left to right, we have PS/2 Keyboard, PS/2 Mouse, IEEE1394, 4x USB, Ethernet and Audio.


The manual will tell you, that you have to put the modules right next to each other for Dual-Channel. A configuration with more space in between would have been better for memory temperatures.

Connectors

The 24-pin ATX power connector is very conveniently placed near the edge of the motherboard. An extra 5.25" power connector is available near one of the PCI-E slots to supply additional power to the video card. This might be needed for optimum stability when running in CrossFire mode. I don't like the placement of the ATX12V connector, near the ATX power connector would have been better. On the other hand, having the connector near the CPU power conversion circuitry sure improves power stability.


Four SATA ports are provided by the ATI chipset, while the other two use an additional SATA chip, which is capable of running SATA-II up to 300 MB/s.


Two ATA-133 ports are located near the ATX Power connector. The connector closest to ATX power is the floppy port.


The front panel header is neither color-coded, nor labeled. At least it follows the common pin layout.


A great feature for overclockers are the two small buttons for Power and Reset. The days of using a screwdriver to power on your system are finally gone.


A total of six fan headers are spread around the board.

Slots

The most important feature of this board is support for CrossFire. The two PCI-E slots are switched via BIOS, there is no need to set any jumpers. When the BIOS is set to one-slot configuration the second slot from top will be the primary video card. Having a card in the other slot will not work.

Cooling

It seems ATI's chipsets are not generating too much heat. That's why a passive solution works fine, even when heavily overclocked. Noise aware PC users will sure love that.
I tried if an active fan would help overclocking, but this is not the case.


Special consideration has been given to keep the MOSFET area around the CPU socket cool. A massive heatsink is attached to the transistors. The heatsink is 35x35mm, which means it will be a bit tricky to get a 40mm fan attached to it.

I laid a 40mm fan on top of the heatsink and marked the heatsink area red in following picture.

As you see, the fan is overlapping, making the screws hard to get in, but it is possible.


You want to use a bigger fan or waterblock? No problem, in addition to the two mounting holes of the heatsink, there are five extra holes here, that could be used to build you own mounting construction.


The heatsink is easy to get off. Sapphire doesn't use glue, but a sticky thermal pad. If you twist the heatsink while pulling it up, it goes off much easier. I see very little risk of accidentally pulling a MOSFET as long as you use common sense.

Chips

Sapphire uses only high-quality components on the motherboard, for example the capacitors are all Japanese-built. Another point to note is that special MOSFETs are used which increase power stability as well as price.


Most monitoring applications support the ITE 8712F monitoring chip, which almost every motherboard manufacturer uses at the moment.


ATI's chipset does not have native support for Ethernet, so one PCI-Express lane is used to implement Gigabit Ethernet via this Marvell 88E805 network chip.


ATI motherboards have to use special clock generators in their designs. Out of the five possible chips the ICS951446 is the most popular with enthusiast motherboards, since it offers options like wide clock range and fixed PCI/PCI-E clocks, even when overclocked.


The Realtec ALC880 sound chip supports Intel's High-Definition Audio standard and offers quite good sound quality as testing later shows.


A SiI3132 Serial ATA chip from Silicon Image provides two 300 MB/s SATA-II ports.


On the board you will find two IEEE1394 ports which are connected to this VIA VT6307 IEEE1394 controller. One port is on the back panel, the other one as header on the board, where you connect the external bracket to.

BIOS

Like most other companies, Sapphire uses the proven Phoenix AwardBios. This BIOS is based on the PI-A9RX480 BIOS, all our complaints from when we reviewed that board have been fixed.


The first page is called Standard CMOS and offers settings to change date/time, HDD and floppy settings.


Advanced BIOS has settings to adjust general BIOS settings like typematic rate and additional bootup-delays. Also you can disable the full screen POST image here, so that you can see the full output of the system startup. On a subpage you can change the order in which the system will try the available boot devices.

Advanced Chipset

Here you find several ATI chipset related options, for example to enable Crossfire. When the Dual Slot setting is set to "single slot", the second PCI-E port will be disabled and the primary one will run at x16. In dual slot mode both slots run at PCI-E x8.


On another subpage you find settings related to the LDT speed and width.
Unlike the nForce4, the LDT frequency is not directly linked to HTT, so if you set 800 MHz here, it stays at 800 MHz, no matter what clock speeds you set for the CPU.

Integrated Peripherals

Integrated Peripherals has options to change, which SATA and IDE ports are activated and to enable/disable USB, Audio, LAN, Floppy and the IEEE1394 interface.

RAID configuration is done in the SATA chip's own setup utility which can be entered by pressing a hotkey during POST.

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Under Power Management, you will find the standard options which are usually listed here. One important option you can enable/disable here, is "AMD Cool&Quiet" which reduces heat output and power consumption when the CPU is idle.


PNP/PCI Configurations has no useful options, except for "Init Display First" maybe which selects which device will be the primary video card.


The Hardware Monitoring page shows the usually monitored fan speeds and voltages.
Three temperatures are monitored here: Ambient temperature, CPU VRM, which is the temperature of the MOSFETS under the big black heatsink and Northbridge voltage, which is the temperature of the ATI RX480 chipset. What I am really missing here is an option to monitor the CPU temperature by reading the on-die thermal diode. The board does support monitoring CPU temperature (and another temperature near the CPU socket) it's just that the BIOS does not list these. Only one fan speed is monitored inside the BIOS, even though the monitoring chip supports more fans.

Options to dynamically change fan speeds based on temperature are not available either.

BIOS: Overclocking

Overclocking

The Overclocking Features page in the BIOS is home to the overclocking options. Sapphire has done an excellent job here, the options are well rounded, you might even find some options which no other board offered yet.


The CPU FSB can be changed in 1 MHz steps between 200 MHz and 440 MHz. Options for the PCI-Express bus frequency range from 100 MHz to 200 MHz. Most people fix it at 100 MHz and it works well.


Four values are available for Northbridge voltage. 1.50V sounds a bit much to me, especially without active cooling on the chipset. But it's better to have the options than to be limited. ATI lists 1.26 V as maximum recommended Voltage for the chipset, but overclockers have never cared about limits set by manufacturers, anyway.


The voltage of the HyperTransport link can be increased up to 1.5 V as well.


Two voltages of the PCI-Express bus can be changed.


Great job here again, Sapphire. DDR voltage is selectable from 2.5 V all the way up to 4.0 V in 0.05 V increments. There is no special "4V Jumper" to be set like on the DFI LanParty NF4 Series.


This setting allows you to define how much the VTT termination voltage should change from the default setting, which automatically tracks the memory voltage.


The easiest way to get a few more MHz out of your CPU, is by increasing the Core voltage. Sapphire's motherboard is one of the few boards to allow undervolting. Minimum voltage is 0.825 V, in steps of 0.025 V you can go up to 1.550 V. If that is not enough for you there is the VID offset setting which allows you to boost your CPU voltage even further. If you remember our review of the PI-A9RX480, you may remember that we complained about too little CPU voltage. Sapphire sat down with us, listened to our suggestions and now you can go up to 2.16 V.


Another new feature in this BIOS is the auto overclocking feature. Based on CPU temperature it will increase the CPU clock. Personally I prefer to know what the system is running at, but for media PCs which are supposed to run silent this offers a whole lot of new options. When the box is idle, run at a really low clock (200 FSB and low multiplier). When videos are played back (CPU temperature rises) and the CPU might be too slow, automatically increase the clocks.

Memory Timings

Wow, that is a lot of options to play with. It is a good idea to have three groups: Timing Mode, User Config Mode and DRAM ECC Feature Control. Each one can be set to Auto or Manual. If you like to tweak you memory settings, you will love this board. Everything I can think of has been covered in the BIOS.


The memory clock setting allows to change to the usual memory dividers. Running memory faster than the HT is not possible here.


I really like this bootmenu. When you press a hotkey during startup you are presented with the menu which allows quick selection of the startup device without messing with the BIOS settings.

Test Systems

Test System "Sapphire PI-A9RD480"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ (S939; 512KB; Venice)
Motherboard:	Sapphire PURE Crossfire PC-A9RD480, Bios ATI RD480
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC3500 Gold GX 2-2-2-5
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.10
OC 2700 is 9x300 FSB, Mem ratio 2:3 (=200 MHz)

Test System "Sapphire PI-A9RX480"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ (S939; 512KB; Venice)
Motherboard:	Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480, Bios 07/27/05 ATI RX480
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC3500 Gold GX 2-2-2-5
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.7
OC 2700 is 9x300 FSB, Mem ratio 2:3 (=200 MHz)

Test System "LP NF4 Expert"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ (S939; 512KB; Venice)
Motherboard:	DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR Expert, Bios 17/11/05 nForce4 SLI
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC3500 Gold GX 2-2-2-5
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.11
OC 2700 is 9x300 FSB, Mem ratio 2:3 (=200 MHz)

Test System "ASRock 939Dual-SATA2"
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 3000+ (S939; 512KB; Venice)
Motherboard:	ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, Bios 1.40 ULi M1695
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC-3200 Gold GX 2-2-3-5
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.10
OC 2700 is 9x300 FSB, Mem ratio 2:3 (=200 MHz)

Test System "ABIT AL8"
CPU:	Intel Pentium 4 3.0F (S775; 2MB; Prescott)
Motherboard:	ABIT AL8, Bios 1.4 i945P
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC2-5400 EB Platinum 4-2-2-8
Video Card:	ATI X850 Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.8
OC is 15 x 300 = 4500 MHz, Memory 1:1 = DDR2-600

Test System "AA8XE"
CPU:	Intel Pentium 4 3.0F (S775; 2MB; Prescott)
Motherboard:	ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE, Bios 1.4 i925XE
Memory:	2x 512MB OCZ PC2-5400 EB Platinum 4-2-2-8
Video Card:	ATI X800 Non-Pro PCI-E
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	HEC Power475
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.4
OC 4500 is 15x300 FSB, Mem Ratio 1:1 (=300 MHz)

Test System "P4 2.4C"
CPU:	Intel Pentium 4 2.4C (S478; 512KB; Northwood)
Motherboard:	ABIT IC7, Bios 2.8 i875P
Memory:	2x 256MB Generic PC3200 2.5-3-3-6
Video Card:	ATI X800 XT
Harddisk:	Maxtor DiamondMax 160GB
Power Supply:	Antec TrueControl 550W
Software:	Windows XP SP2, Catalyst 5.4
OC 3400 is 15x283 FSB, Mem Ratio 2:3 (=188 MHz)

SiSoftware Sandra

Higher is better


In this mainly CPU dependant benchmark, all AMD systems show the same performance.

Lavalys Everest

Higher is better. For latency, lower is better.



While the read performance of all boards is very similar, the Sapphire board's write performance is a good deal faster than the rest. When it comes to memory latency, DFI's Expert board takes the crown.

SuperPi

Lower is better


The Crossfire board from Sapphire does not seem to like calculating Pi, but can catch up some when overclocked.

PCMark 2004

Higher is better

PCMark04 favors Intel CPUs with their HyperThreading Technology a lot, Sapphire delivers respectable scores.

3DMark 2001

Higher is better

In 3DMark2001 the DFI Expert board is the fastest AMD board.

CineBench

Higher is better

The nForce4 motherboards show about the same speed, Intel systems with their Hyper-threading Technology are king here.

KribiBench

Higher is better

KribiBench uses a proprietary software-only rendering engine to draw a 3D scene and again we see that the Crossfire board from Sapphire gains more from overclocking, than the board without Crossfire.

Comanche 4

Higher is better

In Comanche 4 the Crossfire board falls behind a bit behind the stellar performance of the PI-A9RX480.

Quake 3 Arena

Higher is better

What it lost in Comanche 4, it gained in Quake 3. Only the DFI Expert is a little bit faster than the Sapphire board.

Rightmark Audio Analyzer

We used Rightmark Audio Analyzer together with a loop-back cable to analyze the quality of the on-board audio solution.

Summary

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:	+0.26, -0.30	Good
Noise level, dB (A):	-86.0	Good
Dynamic range, dB (A):	85.9	Good
THD, %:	0.0039	Very good
IMD, %:	0.031	Good
Stereo crosstalk, dB:	-84.8	Very good
IMD at 10 kHz, %:	0.103	Average

General performance: Good

Frequency Response

Frequency range	Response
From 20 Hz to 20 kHz, dB	-1.70, +0.26
From 40 Hz to 15 kHz, dB	-0.30, +0.26

Noise Level

Parameter	Left	Right
RMS power, dB:	-76.5	-73.9
RMS power (A-weighted), dB:	-86.0	-86.0
Peak level, dB FS:	-63.2	-59.9
DC offset, %:	-0.00	-0.00

Dynamic Range

Parameter	Left	Right
Dynamic range, dB:	+72.9	+70.2
Dynamic range (A-weighted), dB:	+85.9	+86.0
DC offset, %:	-0.00	-0.00

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Parameter	Left	Right
THD, %:	0.0043	0.0039
THD + Noise, %:	0.0381	0.0653
THD + Noise (A-weighted), %:	0.0121	0.0118

Intermodulation distortion

Parameter	Left	Right
IMD + Noise, %:	0.0336	0.0313
IMD + Noise (A-weighted), %:	0.0181	0.0174

Stereo crosstalk

Parameter	L <- R	L -> R
Crosstalk at 100 Hz, dB:	-78	-79
Crosstalk at 1 kHz, dB:	-84	-82
Crosstalk at 10 kHz, dB:	-83	-83

IMD (swept tones)

Parameter	Left	Right
IMD + Noise at 5 kHz, %:	0.0340	0.0337
IMD + Noise at 10 kHz, %:	0.1119	0.1124
IMD + Noise at 15 kHz, %:	0.1636	0.1630

Fan Noise

As mentioned before, the board uses all passive cooling, so the total sound level is 0 dBA.
There were no squeaking noises or similar, even under heavy load.

Overclocking

In order to find out the overclocking potential of the Sapphire PI-A9RX480, we put a Swiftech Storm waterblock on our CPU and set the multiplier to 5x with a memory divider of 2:1. This is to make sure that neither the CPU nor the memory are limiting our overclock here.

A maximum FSB of 351 MHz is very good. This should be good enough for most people. You have to consider that this was with all passive cooling on the chipset (which got blazing hot, around 90°C).
If you put active cooling on the chip, raise the chipset voltage some more and get a lucky board, 400 MHz might be well in reach.

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For a more real-world overclocking score we left the multiplier at 9x and slowly increased the FSB. Since our memory can not run that fast, we had to drop the memory ratio to 2:3 which means the memory was running at DDR400 while the CPU ran at 2700 MHz.

While the system could complete all benchmarks at 2700 MHz, it was not as easy to get there as with the non-Crossfire board. I had to remount the waterblock a couple of times to get a good thermal paste application, to get the system stable. With the previous PI-A9RX480 this was much easier. I would say the maximum CPU frequency would be a little bit lower, maybe 300 HT vs. 302 HT, which is about 0.6%.

	Sapphire is selling the board at around $199, which is certainly not cheap, but still a good deal cheaper than the Crossfire board from DFI.
	Crossfire support Complete set of BIOS options for overclocking Excellent overclocker Good Performance Good on-board Audio All passively cooled
	Expensive OCs slightly less than non-Crossfire board Not as widely available Memory slots not staggered Slim accessory package
9.0	Just like the non-Crossfire version, the PI-A9RD480 is a great overclocker board with loads of features. The set of options in the BIOS is exemplary. For example the voltages can be increased far enough, even to make the phase-change coolers happy. Unlike the more expensive Crossfire motherboard from DFI, the board from Sapphire is certified by ATI for Crossfire, which has suddenly become very important with all the problems people are having with the DFI boards. While the price is a tad high, it is still the cheapest enthusiast AMD64 board which supports Crossfire. If you decide you need Crossfire, you will have to pay for the higher performance.