The sound tract of the Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard is implemented with the Realtek ALC880 codec. This eight-channel codec provides 192kHz/24-bit sound quality and boasts very good theoretical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -100dB. There are six audio-jack connectors on the mainboard rear panel. Besides, the mainboard is supplied with an additional bracket featuring coaxial SPDIF In and Out ports. This audio solution also supports Universal Audio Jack.

During our practical tests the sound system of the Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard received the following scores:

General performance: Very good

High quality sound implementation on this mainboard is proven by our practical tests.

Moreover, the integrated sound of Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 is excellent not only in its analog implementation. During our test session we also noticed that the CPU utilization remained really low during sound playback. Here are the results obtained in 3DMark03 sound test, for instance:

As we see, ATI SB450 and Realtek ALC880 load the CPU less than NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra with a typical sound solution for this chipset - Realtek ALC850.

Now that we have discussed the peculiarities of the controllers integrated into the chipset South Bridge, let’s pass over to those external onboard controllers that are available on Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 PCB.

First of all, let’s say a few words about the network controller. Socket 939 mainboards usually have the logical part of their network controller integrated into the chipset. However, on Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 it is not exactly like that. ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset doesn’t support any networking features at all that is why the manufacturer implemented the network interface via a stand-alone Marvel Yukon 88E8052 controller. It is a gigabit controller connected to the PCI Express x1 bus. As a result, this chip can run at up to 1Gbit/s speed not only in theory, but also in real life.

Let’s see how fast this controller is compared with an integrated network controller of NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset. Here we used NTttcp utility from Microsoft Windows NT DDK. To make it all fair, we disabled NVIDIA Firewall 2.0, because it may lay additional workload on the CPU. Here are the obtained results:

AA = Active Armor

With the frames of standard length, marvel Yukon 88E8052 performs quite well, yielding to NVIDIA nForce4 only in the CPU utilization test. However once we switch to Jumbo frames (Ethernet packets increased to 9,000 bytes), this controller start losing to NVIDIA nForce4 dramatically fast, with the bandwidth dropping far below the theoretical value.

In conclusion to our discussion of the mainboard features I would like to say that due to VIA VT6307 controller Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 mainboard has two IEEE1394a ports with the 400Mbit/s bandwidth. One of the ports is laid out on the mainboard rear panel, and another one is implemented as an onboard pin-connector. A corresponding bracket with the additional port is included into the accessories bundle.