Sapphire PI-A9RX480

Rounding things up:

A friend of mine has claimed that I must have the Gods of ATI overlooking me. Thus far, we have not had a major problem with a production motherboard based on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and we've tested a few different production - and pre-production - motherboards based on the chipset over the last 9 months or so.

However, that is not to say that others haven't had problems with the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, and also the ULi South Bridge that is a popular companion to one of the Radeon Xpress 200 North Bridges. Sapphire's board comes with ATI's SB450 South Bridge, so we didn't have to worry about driver installation for the SATA ports before installing Windows XP.

In fact, we never expected a problem with a Sapphire produced, ATI certified product and nor did we ever experience one. There is nothing major that really annoys us about the board itself. The heatsinks are glued on, instead of using the preferred push pins. There is also the set of capacitors in the close vicinity of the CPU socket. Neither of those are real problems, as such.

The lack of SATA II built into the South Bridge might be a concern for some, but SB450 has support for the SATA 1.0a specification, which means that it is still able to utilise the useful performance enhancing Native Command Queuing technology, providing your hard drive has support for it. You will not, however, be able to hot swap drives or use external SATA drives - as far as we are aware, these are strictly part of the SATA II specification.

For those who do require SATA II support, there are two additional ports included via the Silicon Image Disk Controller that Sapphire has included on the PI-A9RX480, so you're not completely left out. The other slight concern is the reduced number of RAID options available with the motherboard and its chipset - competing solutions offer a wider range of RAID options, but it ultimately depends on whether you're planning on using the on-board disk controllers for RAID.

Value:

Sapphire only provided us with one etailer, but we found two others as well. Ebuyer are selling it at £125 including VAT, while Tekheads and OcUK are selling the board for £10 more at £135, without factoring in the cost of delivery. To say that the PI-A9RX480 is expensive is a bit an understatement, especially when you consider that you only get the board with no additional incentives to justify the cost in the included the bundle.

Only DFI, along with the top of the line MSI and ASUS motherboards, cost more. However, the increased price for those boards is usually justified by a hell of a lot more product and bundle for your money. To make matters even more worse, the Sapphire CrossFire motherboards are shipping for just under £100!

Admittedly, you don't get the cream PCB, but CrossFire is meant to be more enthusiast orientated than a motherboard with support for a single video card motherboard. Having said that, this current board does have a BIOS that is orientated towards the enthusiast - if the Sapphire CrossFire board has anything near to the tweakability of this board, there is something definitely wrong with the pricing.

Final Thoughts...

The board may not perform as absolutely cutting edge as an nForce4-based motherboard, but it's certainly not slow. Unless you're some kind of serious benchmarker who is obsessed by the smallest of differences that we've highlighted, the performance differences will be invisible during normal system use. It may not look as clean as other motherboards, with its mass of unused solder points and big gap in the rear I/O panel, but the red and cream colour scheme is very unique and appealing. It also has everything there that you could need, too. At least, where the motherboard is concerned...

The poor package contents are a big concern to us, and has disappointed us, somewhat. However, you still get a product that is focused on the enthusiast crowd. The fact that Sapphire have taken the time to integrate mounting holes for aftermarket coolers is highly commendable. That, along with the extensive the BIOS options available for overclocking makes this board stand out. Unfortunately, we didn't have the best of luck overclocking the board, but we feel that is related to the CPU rather than the board itself.

The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset may not be considered to be good enough to be integrated into an enthusiast product by many. However, when it is integrated like this, we beg to differ. Sapphire can only get better when refreshing the board in future revisions. Hopefully we'll see them making the PI-A9RX480 a little more affordable or alternatively, giving us more incentive to buy this motherboard with a more complete bundle.

Sapphire has laid some very solid foundations with the PI-A9RX480 and we believe it will prove to be a breeding ground for future revisions of the same product or re-spins to make new products, and we are really looking forward to seeing what comes next. However, in its current state we feel that - for what it is - it's just too expensive to justify purchasing it over competing products in the same price range with a more attractive feature set.