Software

When NVIDIA launched their nForce4 chipset, they paid special attention to its support on the software side. Therefore, Socket 939 users have already got used to receiving the whole bunch of different utilities, such as nTune, nvMixer, nvRAID and Network Access Manager together with the mainboard. ATI is not NVIDIA. The chipset developer didn’t offer anything to bundle with their Radeon Xpress 200P chipset. Sapphire also decided not to spend time on any special software goodies. As a result, Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 doesn’t have any special utilities for hardware management.

Testbed Configuration

We would like to wind up our review of Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard with the detailed performance tests. We decided to compare this mainboard against one of the most popular solutions on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra – DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D. This comparison will allow us to make our final verdict about the relative performance of ATI Radeon Xpress 200P and the mainboard based on it we have been discussing today.

So, here is the hardware we used to assemble our testbeds:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU (Venice, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2).
• Mainboards:
• DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 (ATI Radeon Xpress 200P).
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10).
• PowerColor RADEON X850 XT graphics card.
• Western Digital Raptor WD740GD (SATA150) HDD.

All tests were run in Microsoft Windows XP SP2.