Sapphire Lady in White overclocks well

YOU all know Sapphire as one of the ATI's top graphic card brands. Those guys are selling a lot of ATI based graphic cards and this actually is not enough for them. They always have volumes of ATI top graphic cards but this time they wanted to get into motherboard business.

They tried to do this before, but they were not that successful. we remember them doing one of the first board based on Radeon IGP chipset, a troublesome little chap. This time Sapphire did its homework nicely.

It decided to make the special overclocking motherboards simply called "Pure" painted in a very attractive white PCB colour and to market it as an overclocker's board.

Sapphire didn't go overtweaking the original reference design. It took the ATI Manta motherboard, tweaked it a little bit, made a white PCB for it with a new BIOS and packed it into a fancy looking box. This is a very safe strategy as it helps you to address and solve your problems as ATI will be on it all the time. You first solve reference and then the uniform design issues.

Just like ATI's Manta reference RD580 motherboard, this unit has a lot of power connectors on it. It has two 12 V Molex connectors to power, for the both cards in Crossfire. As well as this, there is a eight pin voltage connector for the CPU and a standard 24 pin ATX connector. Asus A8R-32 Deluxe didn't have that many power connectors but ATI and Sapphire didn't want to take any chances with the power. You need a good PSU to make this sort of stuff work well.

The board has two PCIe by 16X slots and a single PCI slot. You won't be able to use this PCI slot if you use two X1800 XT or X1900 XTX dual cards. There is no single PCIe 1X slot. The rear panel features PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse, four USB ports, Firewire, LAN and "Azalia" compatible 5.1 analogue audio.

As it is meant for overclockers, reviewers and enthusiasts, the board has power and reset micro buttons on the board that will make your life a little bit easier. Unlike Asus' A8R-32 Deluxe board, the Sapphire board is using RD580 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge from ATI. It is not feature rich as Nforce Southbridge and it does the job, it even works nicely with USB devices. The board has SATA 2 support via Sil3132 chip that supports Raid 0, 1 and JBOD. You won't find much inside the box - there is an installation CD, manual, single SATA cable, single IDE cable, floppy cable, SPDIF in and outs bracket and a Firewire bracket. That's all folks.

The BIOS is super tweakable and has a huge range of options. I bet that even the most experienced will have problems to know and set them all.

Benchmarketing
We tested a single X1900XTX card on a board while we will follow up with a Crossfire review with two X1900XTX and possibly even two mainstreams X1800GTO.

We used :
Sapphire Pure Crossfire PC-A9RD580
Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe RD580
Athlon FX 57 2800 MHz 90 nanometre San Diego core
2x1024 MB Corsair XMS-3500LL PRO memory
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB SATA NCQ hard drive
Akasa AK128 EVO Athlon 64 cooler
Akasa 650W multi rail PSU

Doom 3	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	109.2	105.3	95.1	66.2
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	112.4	108.4	97.8	67.4
Doom 3 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	101.3	85.5	68.4	44.5
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	103.3	86.3	68.4	44.5
Far Cry	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	81.70	80.26	81.14	80.35
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	85.75	84.68	85.13	83.56
Far Cry High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	78.98	80.69	79.59	62.51
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	84.46	84.35	82.62	62.71
Quake 4	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	142.5	138.4	133.4	111.2
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	144.8	141.7	136.8	113.4
Quake 4 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	137.1	128.2	116.3	89.1
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	139.4	131.8	118.1	89.4
FEAR	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	118	92	73	50
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	120	92	72	51
FEAR High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 16X	1024x768	1280x960	1600x1200	2048x1536
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	87	67	51	35
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	88	69	51	35
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	3DMark 03	Game2	Game3	Nature
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	18405	153.2	112.8	117.0
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	18517	153.8	112.1	117.8
CPU Test	CPU Score	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	1298	150.8	22.0
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	1331	154.1	22.7
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel Shader 2.0
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	4338.2	9854.0	64.0	210.7
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	4338.6	9854.9	64.0	211.2
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	3DMark 05	Game1	Game2	Game3
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	11377	47.9	33.4	58.9
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	11486	48.7	33.6	59.3
CPU Test	CPU Score	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5732	2.6	5.6
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	6030	2.8	5.7
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05	Single Texturinng	Multi Textur.	Pixel Shader	VS /VS complex
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5136.2	10293.6	439.0	141.6/61.8
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5138.2	10287.7	439.0	141.7/61.8
Composite Figures 3Dmark 06	3DMark 06
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5142
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5144
SM2.0 Test	Score	GT1	GT2
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	2297	17.774	20.512
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	2296	17.808	20.459
HDR/SM3.0 Test	Score	HDR1	HDR2
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	2562	24.602	26.647
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	2563	24.564	26.688
CPU Test	Score	CPU1	CPU2
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	1100	0.347	0.558
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	1102	0.347	0.560
PC Mark 2004	CPU	Memory	HDD	Total
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5166	5144	4913	5638
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	5168	5791	4880	5695
PC Mark 2005	CPU	Memory	HDD	Total
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	4043	4226	5232	4689
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	4038	4576	5223	4730
Sandra 2005	CPU	Memory	Multimedia
Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	12583	4912	26698
	5701	4916	28505
Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-A9RD580 X1900XTX 650/1550 MHz	12563	5783	26440
	5685	5823	28734

As you can see, the Sapphire Pure Crossfire RD580 based board is faster in every single test than Asus A8R-32 MVP Deluxe. Without FSAA, Doom 3 scores up to three frames per second faster while with FSAA it is a draw or one to two frames faster.

On the first three resolutions, Far Cry on Sapphire runs four frames per second faster than Asus - again something of an achievement. With FSAA, card can be even six frames faster which is indeed a lot.

Sapphire is again faster in Quake 4 and runs three frames faster, and two to three frames faster with FSAA and Aniso on.

In FEAR, with and without FSAA 4X and 16X Anisotropic, it scores up to two frames faster. Even the 3Dmarks are on Sapphire's side - it scores 100 points more in 3Dmark03 and the CPU test is faster on the Sapphire motherboard.

The Sapphire board clearly runs the memory faster. PCmark04 shows a massive 650 makes difference in memory test. This is the secret of this board. The HDD score is slightly slower due to the south bridge but it is an almost insignificant difference.

In PCmark05, the overall score is identical but once again the Sapphire RD580 board runs the memory 350 marks faster.

Sandra 2005 finally shows what is going on. Even the CPU scores are tight the memory runs 5783 MB/s while the Asus board can run 4916 MB/s only. This makes a difference and it makes multimedia operations faster by 2000 marks as well.

Conclusion
This board is fast, good looking, reliable, tweakable and overclockable what more can you ask from the motherboard. If you get one you won't regret it, it is a top notch product. µ