Sapphire PI-A9RX480

General Performance:

On average the Sapphire PI-A9RX480 performs slightly better than the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, but the 1-2% difference is within experimental error. All of the Athlon 64-based motherboards we've included in the comparison perform roughly the same as each other when using a single video card.

Sapphire's PI-A9RX480 finished the MP3 encode test a single second behind the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, but was a match for the Foxconn NF4SK8AA SLI motherboard. The Shuttle SD11G5 was the slowest of the bunch, but it has the least memory bandwidth available to it, meaning that it was always going to suffer in this test.

The Sapphire PI-A9RX480 is about 30 seconds behind the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme over the course of the 20 minute video encode when the ECS board is operating in single graphics card mode, but the performance gap is reduced when SLI mode is enabled on the ECS motherboard. A long test like this highlights the small performance differences much more clearly than the shorter tests.

The difference between nForce4 SLI and Radeon Xpress 200P is clearer now, despite using the same CPU and memory. When compared to the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, the Sapphire PI-A9RX480 drops around 5 seconds over the course of the MP3 encode.

In our image manipulation test, the Sapphire PI-A9RX480 board performs on par with the ECS nForce4 SLI board when a single 6800 GT is used. The PI-A9RX480 slightly outperforms the ECS board when it is operating in SLI mode.