Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
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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afrost - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
One of the big things for me is that there is only passive cooling on the motherboard without the need for crazy heatpipes etc. This is really important for those of us who want to build silent computers.I'v definately picking up this board from Saphire.
Zebo - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Good point must run at lower temp than nvidia's single chipset solution which gets hot as hell when you start cranking HTT.rjm55 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
We mentioned several times in the article that Sapphire will launch the new board in early August. Sapphire has confirmed their plans to launch around August 5. Sapphire has asked us to pass on that you will be able to buy retail PI-A9RX480 motherboards in most markets by August 15th-20th. Price will be "competetive with nForce4".Resh - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Any idea on when we will see them? I'd really like to go that route, but I can't wait forever!Wesley Fink - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Halibut (Crossfire AMD) and Stingray (Crossfire Intel) boards are ready to go to reviewers, but there are still some decisions being made at ATI. We have also seen the prototype retail boards from Gigabyte and another manufacturer. When ATI decides whether Crossfire will be now or with R520 (just a guess at events) Crossfire will roll out quickly.Resh - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Thansk Wesley. I wish they would hurry up with that decision... RAM is ordered and PSU, CPU, and X800XL will be ordered this w/e, too, so they better get the motherboards out!If you do hear something, please share it with the rest of us.
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coomar - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
wow the white pcb stands out, at least the thing is packaged wellDhaval00 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
A week ago, AT was having fun posting such rumors... I am sure it thinks otherwise now :)./me feels like getting rid of all my nVIDIA hardware.
ukDave - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Typo on Pg8, second bottom paragraph. "ATI X350XT PE" - the '3' should be an '8' me thinks.Tommouse - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Nice board. Still undecided on the white color though.I wonder if the Zalman CNPS7700-Cu will fit :|