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ATI Radeon Xpress 200P for Overclockers: Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 Mainboard Review (page 5)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 Mainboard: Closer Look

It is not an easy task to design a high-end mainboard on ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset. From the supported features point of view, this baby would be closer to the budget segment. Mostly due to the anachronistic SB450 South Bridge, its features list is close to that of budget solutions from SiS and VIA. Therefore, the mainboard maker had to integrate quite a few additional controllers onto the PCB in order to make Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 look like a high-end solution.

Nevertheless, chipset is still the one that determines all major mainboard functions. Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 supports all Socket 939 processors including Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX and dual-core Athlon 64 X2. Of course, the mainboard supports DDR SDRAM, which should be used in dual-channel configurations for maximum performance. There are 4 184-pin DDR DIMM slots on the board. However, despite the good tradition to make the slots belonging to the same memory channel of the same color, these slots are not color coded. So, you will have to take a look at the user’s guide to make sure that the memory modules are installed correctly.

There is a PCI Express x16 graphics card slot on the PCB. This mainboard modification doesn’t support CrossFire technology, however, in the near future Sapphire PURE Innovation product line is going to have solutions supporting two ATI graphics cards at the same time.

Besides the PCI Express x16 slot, there are four more expansion slots on the board: two PCI Express x1 slots and two regular PCI slots. I cannot say that I was impressed with the number of expansion slots onboard, however since the mainboard is equipped with a full set of integrated controllers, the available slots should be more than enough in most configurations.

As for the basic characteristics of Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480, there are no questions here. However, when it comes to the functions implemented via the additional onboard controllers and the chipset South Bridge, the situation is no longer so simple.

First of all I would like to pay special attention to the Serial ATA RAID controllers integrated into the chipset South Bridge. According to the specification, ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset supports 4 Serial ATA-I channels and allows building RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays. In reality, ATI gave up the development of their own Serial ATA controller and asked Silicon Image for help. As a result, SB450 South Bridge contains two integrated SiI3132 controllers, which for some reason do not support Serial ATA-II.

There are several inconveniences resulting from this. Firstly, we get no support for RAID 0+1 arrays. Secondly, RAID arrays can only be built from the drives that are connected to the neighboring channels, such as 1 and 2, or 3 and 4 belonging to the same controller. Thirdly, you will need a floppy disk with drivers for Windows XP and a floppy drive if you decide to use SiI3132 in RAID mode, because this is not a native controller.

In order to make our final conclusion about the efficiency of the Serial ATA controller integrated into the SB450 chipset South Bridge, we resorted to FutureMark PCMark05 benchmark suite. The tests were performed for a single Raptor WD360GD hard disk drive as well as for a RAID 0 array made of two HDDs like that. We compared the results with the performance of corresponding disk subsystems built on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based platform.