AMD 770X Motherboard Duel

Sapphire AM2RX780 Board layout

While the board layout of the AM2RX780 (why is it called that since it’s a 770X chipset board we're unsure!) seems fine on first glance, upon closer inspection we see some slight oversights, most annoyingly, the fact that the front panel header is completely unlabelled, making connecting up the front panel either a trial and error guessing game, or a quest into the manual.

The lack of colour coding continues with all the board’s USB, audio and parallel headers, although these are all mercifully labelled.
However, the board layout itself is just fine, with plenty of clearance between the CPU socket and upper PCI-Express slot, although larger CPU heatsinks may obstruct two of the ram slots if, like us, you use tall memory modules - we advise checking compatibility and cooler height.

The board uses a combination of electrolytic and solid state capacitors, with the solid state capacitors reserved for those around the CPU and PWMs. The AM2RX780 comes with five PWM phases, helping to improve the board’s efficiency in high power load situations, and hopefully delivering stable power to ensure a reasonable overclock. The environmentally sealed chokes, ensure protection against corrosion and lengthen the board’s lifespan in humid or coastal areas where exposed iron cores can deteriorate.


Where Sapphire has cut costs is the PWM, north bridge and south bridge cooling solution, with five individual, unlinked PWM coolers, and similarly basic north bridge and south bridge heatsinks. While functional, we always like to see higher quality chipset cooling solutions, as they can help enormously towards overclockability and the general stability of a board, however the very low wattage AMD chipsets thankfully don't require that much cooling.


The AMD SB600 south bridge again limits the board to four SATA ports, and these are located to the right of the board along with the floppy and IDE ports. However a large dual slot graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 3870/4870, GeForce 8800 GTS, 8800 GTX, 9800 GTX, etc.) in the top PCI-Express slot will obscure the SATA1 and SATA2 ports, dropping the SATA count to a disappointing pair. This could have been easily rectified by making the four at 90 degrees to the edge instead. The 24-pin power connector is sensibly positioned and easily accessed, but the eight-pin socket is positioned between the PWM heatsinks and the rear I/O, so could prove tricky to reach when the board is fitted in a case.

The PCI-Express x16 slots themselves both support x8 bandwidth, so CrossFire performance should be reasonable, and any concerns of single card performance are dealt with by the included PCI-Express switch card. This small PCB fits into the second PCI-Express x16 slot and re-directs the eight lanes to the top slot to grant a single card solution the full x16 bandwidth. This clever inclusion means that the Sapphire should have solid single, and multi-GPU performance.

Colour-wise, we aren’t too sure of the “stars and stripes” red, white and blue (and yellow) colour scheme of the board, and the white motherboard components especially look a little cheap. There are five different colour components on the board (including the PCB) and the whole design just seems a little too busy for our liking - sort of a mish-mash between "helpful differentiation" and "enthusiast colour co-ordination".

Finally, those of you with sharp eyes will have noticed that the AM2RX780 is not full ATX width, and sure enough, it only has six holes for motherboard attachment. This means that when plugging in the 24-pin power connector, or IDE cables, these can bend the board alarmingly due to its unsupported right hand side. Saving PCB space means saving money but it’s made for a bit more cramped board, as shown by the poorly positioned SATA ports.