Board features

The PI-A9RX480 is based on ATI’s RADEON XPRESS 200 chipset, in particular, the board is composed of the RX480 North Bridge and ATI’s SB450 South Bridge. Since it’s targeted towards enthusiasts, the PI-A9RX480 doesn’t feature integrated graphics, unlike earlier XPRESS 200 motherboards. To avoid any confusion, it’s also important to note that the PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 isn’t a CrossFire board. While it was first announced at Computex back in June, retail CrossFire products are still officially missing in action. Until then, the PI-A9RX480 is intended to take on nForce4 Ultra motherboards head-on.

Cooling on the South Bridge too

ATX power connector snuggly tugged between floppy/IDE connectors

From a features perspective, the PI-A9RX480 is well equipped for this mission. The board supports all they key features you’d expect to find in an enthusiast level nForce4 Ultra motherboard. Its SB450 South Bridge natively supports four Serial ATA hard drives (with RAID 0,1 support), while an additional storage controller from Silicon Image (the Sil 3132) adds support for two more Serial ATA hard disk drives, bringing total support for up to six drives. The Sil 3132 isn’t your average SATA storage controller either, supporting such features as native command queuing (NCQ) and 3Gbps Serial ATA II transfer speeds. To ensure optimal performance, the Sil 3132 utilizes an x1 PCI Express link, good for up to 2.5Gbps.



For networking duties, Sapphire skips ATI’s SB450 South Bridge, opting instead to use a Gigabit Ethernet network controller from Marvell, the 88E8052. Like the Silicon Image controller, the 88E8052 is a PCI-E device. This is important, as an older PCI-based GigE network controller could theoretically saturate the PCI bus with one large file transfer.

By sticking with PCI-E devices for their network and storage controllers, Sapphire ensures that the PCI bus’ 133MB/sec of peak bandwidth won’t bottleneck these components.

Audio

One of the chief criticisms that was directed towards the XPRESS 200 chipset and the Bullhead reference platform in particular was its plain-jane 5.1 audio support. As a result, board partners relied on South Bridge solutions from ALi to get around this. Fortunately this oversight has been corrected in ATI’s newer SB450 South Bridge, with the chipset natively supporting Intel’s High Definition “Azalia” 7.1 audio.

Realtek’s ALC880 CODEC is responsible for handling audio duties. The ALC880 features a 100db signal-to-noise ratio, making it one of the better CODECs on the market, as well as jack-sensing technology.

You can see the PCI-E Marvell controller, VIA Firewire, Realtek audio, and Silicon Image chips here

To round out the package, Sapphire uses VIA’s popular VIAFire VT6307 FireWire controller. The VT6307 is one of the older FireWire controllers on the market and can be found on dozens of motherboards we’ve tested. As such, it’s bound by the PCI bus. Finally, Sapphire includes four USB ports on the back plate of the PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 board itself. Since the motherboard ships without an external USB header, these are all the ports the board supports out-of-the-box.