You can find the review of the Sapphire PURE PI-A9RX480 245.here
If you look at the benchmarks and keep in mind it is early hardware, I must say I am surprised! Heck, since when do you read this concerning pre-production ATI mainboards:
"We have rarely tested a board with such incredible stability in overclocking as this Sapphire ATI.(...) The Sapphire ATI reached a new record with our standard 4000+ Clawhammer. The highest previous overclock at stock multiplier was 242, but the Grouper went on to a stable"
"The Reference boards are the best and most stable that we have ever tested from an overclocker's perspective,..."
"One area would be features. ATI's performance in IDE, SATA, and SATA2 (with the Sil3132) is exemplary. We have often seen new chipsets where storage performance is much worse than the current best. Considering the newest versions of the ATI Radeon Xpress X200 family with the SB450 South Bridge, this certainly does not appear to be the case. Storage performance is excellent compared to any of the leaders."
"the ATI is the first AMD chipset to market with Azalia High-Definition audio. Azalia HD exhibited low overhead in all audio modes, and most important, the sound quality is stunning compared to the majority of audio codecs currently residing on AMD motherboards."
WTF?!?
USB2 performance is still crap though... Still, it looks like we do have a worthy competitor to nForce4 boards after all. I wonder what the Intel solution looks like. Now we need some hardcore site putting the board through their tests and see what it really can do.
If you look at the benchmarks and keep in mind it is early hardware, I must say I am surprised! Heck, since when do you read this concerning pre-production ATI mainboards:
"We have rarely tested a board with such incredible stability in overclocking as this Sapphire ATI.(...) The Sapphire ATI reached a new record with our standard 4000+ Clawhammer. The highest previous overclock at stock multiplier was 242, but the Grouper went on to a stable"
"The Reference boards are the best and most stable that we have ever tested from an overclocker's perspective,..."
"One area would be features. ATI's performance in IDE, SATA, and SATA2 (with the Sil3132) is exemplary. We have often seen new chipsets where storage performance is much worse than the current best. Considering the newest versions of the ATI Radeon Xpress X200 family with the SB450 South Bridge, this certainly does not appear to be the case. Storage performance is excellent compared to any of the leaders."
"the ATI is the first AMD chipset to market with Azalia High-Definition audio. Azalia HD exhibited low overhead in all audio modes, and most important, the sound quality is stunning compared to the majority of audio codecs currently residing on AMD motherboards."
WTF?!?
USB2 performance is still crap though... Still, it looks like we do have a worthy competitor to nForce4 boards after all. I wonder what the Intel solution looks like. Now we need some hardcore site putting the board through their tests and see what it really can do.