Overclocking and Stability

Setting the BIOS back to default, but giving the memory a touch more voltage because it's certainly happier that way, the Sapphire lasted six hours before Prime95 returned an error, although 3DMark06 remained looping until we stopped it manually. Even though we used a 95W Phenom CPU, the heatsink and heatpipes were not particularly hot.

While it still kept running and we didn't have a problem with stability, even at faster timings during testing, it seems the BIOS defaults still aren't right for our system which used a typical HD 3850 CrossFire setup, 2GB of DDR2 and a Phenom 9600 Black Edition.

When overclocking, we found that AMD's latest edition of its OverDrive Utility wasn't particularly stable so we resorted to the BIOS to tune our Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (65nm) Energy Efficient. We achieved a healthy 3GHz from it (230x13) and it would boot over this up to 237MHz but wouldn't load Windows. Trying our Phenom 9600 Black Edition, the Sapphire gave us no miracle overclock unfortunately – it wouldn't take to even small multiplier jumps.

Power Consumption

Conclusions and Value

The first board we received had quite serious issues, and while we accept this happens sometimes things only half got better when we received a new board. At first the old board had serious overheating issues – the aluminium heatsink would get far too hot and it would require active cooling otherwise our 125W AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ would lock up when it was running our benchmarks. Thankfully, this second board didn't suffer the same problems – the heatsink gets warm, but now not to the point where it starts glowing red.

What has remained is the finicky memory issues that cause "C1" stalls before POST: the motherboard is generally quite fussy and it isn't clever enough to work out what's wrong and work around it like some other boards we've used. It didn't like our Kingston PC-9600 at all and our Corsair 6400-C3 didn't like one set of slots, then the other, but then decided it was now going to work in the original slots after some OCZ FlexXLC PC9200 memory was tried. The OCZ also suffered the same sporadic "I'm going to work... and now I'm not" problems, depending on air pressure, time of day, flying pigs, whether I had eaten breakfast that morning... you name it.

Once it's working you may be tempted to leave it alone, but because it requires an investment in time to find the performance niche and stability where everything just seems to work, this can require the usual BIOS mishaps and CMOS resets.

After some considerable time of not having much fun we fiddled with the drive strengths, tweaked a few timings and voltages just a touch and suddenly everything began to sing – it was like night and day. While we found it surprisingly not to be any faster in our tests, the "feel" of the system (I hope some of you will realise what I mean) just seemed clearly superior.

While the board offers some extra software features – the BIOS still has its "Genie BIOS" section where all the performance options are stored and there’s also the good old DFI "CMOS Reloaded" for storing BIOS profiles. But there is no in-BIOS flashing utility, there’s no automatic updater and you can't even use WinFlash like you should be able to. I killed the first board trying to flash it in Windows, like I've done with many other boards previous, and after talking to Sapphire we were told that the preferred (and only recommended) method was to flash in DOS using a floppy drive.

Sapphire might as well have asked us to install Vista from 4,000 of the little black disks – we don't even have a floppy drive in the office anymore! There's simply never been a need for one in years. Begrudgingly we went through the rigmarole of doing it the old fashioned way, and thankfully this time it our new board survived (at least I had the balls to try, Leo).

It's a package of halves – it looks good, it is a solid performer but only has half decent stability. The bundle is only half there (there's no DFI "trans-piper") and while the manual does include plenty of details about the PCB layout it ignores the BIOS entirely. The only extra software included is from DFI itself – nothing else is added by Sapphire and this is a big loss compared to what we've become accustomed to getting from the big boys.

While I may moan about it I do really like it because it's oh-so-very-DFI in its quirkiness and learning curve. The board itself is fundamentally well laid out with some awesome crazy bits, even if it does do include things like "floppy power connectors" that annoy me. I don't feel Sapphire is pushing this board in the right direction though – it's trying to be too much of a marketing tick box and not concentrating on making the core design flourish. The VOIP edition might be right for some, but I've never heard anyone ever ask "I wish they did that board with a VOIP add-on."

In that respect it's a bit of a shame that the only one available in the UK is the VOIP version – the board we were originally going to review had the better Realtek ALC885 codec, while the VOIP edition has the slightly lower quality ALC888T. However, for what it's worth, anyone wanting a decent sound solution will use a discrete card anyway.

At the time of writing actually finding the board to purchase is extremely difficult – we can't find it available in the US, but it is for sale in Canada. Currently only one website in the UK has it on pre-order for £171.61 (inc. VAT)

Comparatively the MSI K9A Platinum 790FX retails for around £60 less at £107.33, while the Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 we reviewed was £10 less at £160.14 and the 790FX DS5 from Gigabyte is only £113.39. Similarly, the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi AP is has a fair few features itself, but is only £128.38.

There are some massive price differences between boards of the same chipset which is highly unusual. I don't see why you wouldn't buy a significantly cheaper MSI, Gigabyte or Asus over the Sapphire unless the Sapphire has very specific features you're after, and even then you have to really ask if it's worth paying the difference. We use the Asus board in our Phenom testing and it's generally fantastic – there are different BIOS options but still plenty to play with. I'd find it hard to justify the extra cost for digital PWMs and memory drive strengths and even if you wanted those features, there are still hardware and BIOS features that the Sapphire doesn't offer when the Asus does.

Final Thoughts

Sapphire is certainly heading in the right direction with the Pure CrossFireX PC-AM2RD790 – it's a board I'd genuinely consider this time around unlike the company’s previous efforts in this space. For that reason I give it credit, but it's a very tough market out there, and yet again, I can’t help but feel that it’s just a little bit too tough for Sapphire.

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 4/10

• Overall
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• x
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• -
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• -
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• 6/10

What do these scores mean?