In case our controller worked as a regular Serial ATA controller the results were as follows:

In RAID 0 mode we obtained the following results:

In both cases Serial ATA RAID controller of NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra proved faster than the controller of ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset. So, we can state that the Serial ATA implementation in ATI SB450 cannot boast high speed, too. In fact, we were not surprised with the obtained results. During our previous tests of NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based mainboards we saw evident proof that the integrated RAID controller of this chipset was highly efficient due to its hardware peculiarities as well as due to quality buffering in the drivers. Moreover, you should also keep in mind that NVIDIA also offers very convenient RAID array management tools. Unfortunately, ATI doesn’t offer anything like that so far.

Since ATI Radeon Xpress 200P doesn’t support Serial ATA-II standard, while the first hard disk drives are already appearing in the market, Sapphire added an additional onboard controller supporting this new bus. It’s ironical that this controller appeared to be the same SiI3132 connected to the PCI Express x1 bus. This controller implements two additional Serial ATA-II ports on the board, which also support RAID 0 and 1 arrays.

Another weak spot of the Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard is its USB 2.0 controller. The users used to be unhappy about the implementation of the USB ports in the previous version of the Radeon Xpress 200P South Bridge, ATI SB400, since these ports worked at a notably lower speed than the ports on other systems. The mainboard we are reviewing today uses a newer South Bridge, SB450, where ATI was supposed to eliminate this drawback. Let’s see if they did it or not.

We measured the USB bus bandwidth on our Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard and CPU utilization when there is data transferred to and from the external USB 2.0 Maxtor OneTouch 250GB HDD. For our tests we used AIDA32 utility. We will compare the obtained results with those obtained on an NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based system.

It is very sad but it turns out that the USB 2.0 ports supported by the ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset work almost twice as slow as the same ports in the competing products. As a result, the Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard is not free from this drawback, too.

Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 has all the 8 ports supported by the ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset: four ports are laid out on the mainboard rear panel, and another four ports are implemented as onboard pin-connectors on the PCB. Unfortunately, there are no brackets for the case rear panel with additional USB ports in the accessories bundled with the mainboard. That is why two USB pin-connectors remain free when the system is put together and can be connected to the case front-panel USB ports, if there are any available.

Even though the USB 2.0 and Serial ATA RAID controllers of our mainboards didn’t prove up to our expectations, we wouldn’t say anything like that about the integrated sound solution. It turned out highly functional, boasted High Definition Audio support and showed very good performance during our tests.