X-bit labs

ATI Radeon Xpress 200P for Overclockers: Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 Mainboard Review (page 13)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 09/02/2005 | 10:27 AM ]

Under the great impression by the variety of overclocking friendly options available in the BIOS Setup of the Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard we got down to practical tests. First of all, I tried to enable dynamic overclocking. However, it turned out that this feature didn’t work yet in the BIOS version we had at that time. In fact, the company representatives assured us that the new BIOS versions will have dynamic overclocking feature working just fine.

To tell the truth, we didn’t get that much upset about the absence of dynamic overclocking at that point. A true overclocker will not use an option like that anyway. It was much more interesting to see how the mainboard would do during manual overclocking. During our experiments we will try to find that top clock generator frequency when the product remains stable. During our experiments we used Athlon 64 3800+ on Venice core (working at the nominal 2.4GHz) with the clock multiplier reduced to 6x from the very beginning. The memory frequency was reduced to the guaranteed level, so that it didn’t hinder our overclocking experiments.

We managed to raise the clock generator frequency to 245MHz in no time with 5x HyperTransport multiplier. This frequency is comparable with what we would obtain during overclocking on NVIDIA nForce4 based mainboards. Since the lower HyperTransport frequency usually allows increasing the mainboards overclocking potential, we reduced the corresponding multiplier accordingly.

Once the HyperTransport multiplier was set to 4x, we managed to reach the frequency of 306MHz on the clock generator. It is an excellent result. NVIDIA nForce4 based mainboard usually give in even before they reach this point. However, we couldn’t stop and we continued.

Having set the HyperTransport multiplier to 3x, the mainboard’s potential grew even greater and we could hit the 340MHz frequency on the clock generator. And this value indicates that the mainboard remains very stable at high clock generator frequencies, which is certainly good.

I have to say that Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 overclocked not any worse than most of NVIDIA nForce4 based mainboards we have already tested in our lab.

Here are the results we obtained on Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 throughout this test session: