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.