Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Overclocking: Sapphire PURE Innovation
| Sapphire PURE Innovation | |
| Overclocking Testbed | |
| Processor: | Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz, 1MB Cache) |
| CPU Voltage: | 1.525V (default 1.50V) |
| Cooling: | Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 Heatsink/Fan |
| Power Supply: | OCZ Power Stream 520W |
| Memory: | OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev. 2 (Samsung TCCD Memory Chips) |
| Hard Drive: | Seagate 120GB 7200RPM SATA 8MB Cache |
| Maximum OC: (Standard Ratio) |
245x12 (4x HT, 2.5-3-3-10) 2940MHz (+22.5%) |
| Maximum FSB: (Lower Ratio) |
302 x 9 (3x HT, 1T) (2718MHz, 2 DIMMs in DC mode) (+51% Bus Overclock) |
We have rarely tested a board with such incredible stability in overclocking as this Sapphire ATI. It was not always easy to reach our desired overclock with all of the exceptional range of options available in BIOS, but once we reached the overclock, it was extremely stable. We did notice that the Sapphire ATI responds best to gradual increases in overclocking - it does not like, for example, to be set directly to 245 clock frequency. It will reach higher overclocks if the Clock frequency is increased gradually instead of in one fell swoop.
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 245. This would be quite an accomplishment for any board, but it is remarkable for a first production board. The 302 Maximum bus frequency was also a great performance. ATI clearly set out to build an enthusiast board for Sapphire that other manufacturers could copy down to the smallest detail. Sapphire was smart enough to recognize a good thing when they saw it and they have faithfully reproduced the original Reference board. Our advice to most manufacturers developing ATI Radeon Xpress 200 designs would be to copy the Reference Design. Unless you are certain that you can extract even more performance from this chipset, it is best to copy the top-performing Xpress 200 Reference boards - whether single-GPU or Crossfire Dual-GPU.
At settings of 2T, we could reach even higher to a frequency of 320. There is a lot of discussion on the web these days, claiming that you can minimize the impact of the 2T setting with certain options on Revision E AMD processors. We did not verify this claim in our tests with an earlier standard Clawhammer processor, but we can tell you that all the talk about options for improving 2T performance modes are in the memory timings section. It is little touches like this that tell us that enthusiasts in ATI or Sapphire or outside the company have had a big hand in the design of the Radeon Xpress 200 family of chipsets.
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QueBert - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I like the white, but not a big fan of red. As for it being the "first white motherboard we've seen" There was a really sweet looking one by I believe, Epox. Platinum colored PCB with blue and gold on the board. The color scheme of this Sapphire is different, and different is good. I hate green/red PCB's.beorntheold - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Under Gaming Performance:"... If you keep in mind that the orange bar represents the same NVIDIA 6800 Ultra used to test the other boards in this review, you can clearly see that the Sapphire ATI is at or near the top in most game tests..."
There is either an error in the graph or in the text - because the orange bar clearly says
nV 7800 GTX.
Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
> This number is meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second.What exactly is meant here?
Isn't more completed operations per second better?
Wesley Fink - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I meant that the operations per second is meaningless as a SPECIFICATION of hard drive performance. Yes, more operations per second is better, but you will never see iPeak ops/sec quoted as a specification.roel - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
And what about support for linux?Will it boot? Will it be fast as well?
I'd like to know.
roel
kevykev - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
What is with the stupid fish names though? How ridiculous.TheInvincibleMustard - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Actually, that was one of the first things to catch my eye ... Not the fish, but the jaguar, with the silkscreened logo looking almost exactly the same as the automobile company (Google Images if you're curious). The actual leaping cat is positioned slightly differently between the two, but the similarity is remarkable.If I had better image manipulation on this machine I'm at, I'd whip up a side-by-side comparison to better illustrate (hehe) my point.
shoRunner - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
All i can say is drool, this definately looks like a very promising board, if they can fix the issue with the USB transfer rates(even without a fix its will still be very competative, how often do most ppl transfer huge amounts of data over USB?). What i still want to see is one of these boards with the integrate graphics and a DVI port.Stas - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Just as I expected: nVidia is whooped. ATi + AMD = PerformanceZebo - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Looks great Wes..cept for memory is to close together and not staggard and may present cooling problems between the sticks...plus the board looks like green snot, much prefer blacks, reds and blues.