Sapphire PI-A9RX480

The motherboard itself has wasted PCB space for non-existent components all over it, which gives us a first impression that Sapphire may have gone to print before it was truly finished. We hope this isn't a lasting impression, because the board looks great in this reviewers opinion. However, the colour scheme is an aquired taste - we've had many arguements about whether we like or dislike its looks.

On the subject of taste, I would like to point out that I did indeed perform a sniff and taste test just to check if it was either a scratch n sniff job or whether it had been coated in double cream at some point along the manufacturing line. Alas, neither was true. Unfortunately, despite new PCBs smelling great, they don't smell or taste anything like any dairy products and summer fruits. A shame.

There are four DIMM slots which support up to 4GB of standard 2.5V DDR SDRAM at PC3200. Along the right hand edge we have a 24pin ATX socket which is backward compatible to legacy 20pin ATX, as well as floppy and both IDE channels. The four natively supported SATA ports line up right next to the South Bridge, which only supports the SATA 1.0a specification. However, Sapphire has included a Silicon Image SATA controller supporting two SATA II ports, located at the bottom of the motherboard.

It could be said that ATI's SB450 South Bridge is underwhelming compared to say, the nForce4 MCPs, NVIDIA’s nForce4 MCP supports more USB 2.0 ports that have a lower CPU usage when using the USB 2.0 ports, along with native SATA II and a wider range of RAID options. However, we feel that it is worth noting that there are very few occasions where modern SATA hard disk drives can saturate a 150MB SATA bus, let alone a 300MB SATA II bus. Also it is worth noting that, unless you are constantly abusing the USB bus with large data IO, you will not suffer from the SB450’s increased CPU usage.

The SB450 also supports High Definition Audio which is leaps and bounds over NVIDIA's legacy AC97 Audio. ULI also produce a South Bridge for the ATI Xpress 200 range of chipsets but are in incredibly short supply and can cause driver conflicts between ULI South Bridge and ATI North Bridge. So, in all the SB450 may look poor on paper and has a few fallbacks, but it actually makes good sense to use it, in our opinion.

High Definition Audio comes from the familiar Realtek ALC880 codec, which is a basic High Definition Audio chip, compared to the more recent - and more expensive - ALC882M. Although there aren't any optical S/PDIF ports supplied, you do get RCA S/PDIF via a motherboard pin-out. As it is an onboard pin-out, you could always substitute it for optical S/PDIF if required. There is the same story with USB 2.0 support too. Despite the fact that only four USB 2.0 ports are provided, the pin-out for 4 more is located on the motherboard, so it is still possible to plug in extra USB devices.

Sapphire has included onboard power and reset switches for testing the board outside your case - this is exceptionally convenient for us hardcore motherboard testers. However, they also include an onboard speaker and a front panel pin-out that isn't colour-coded. The onboard speaker could become an inconvenience, especially if you don’t like hearing your PC boot. On the other hand, the lack of colour coding on the front panel pin-outs is a minor annoyance.

There is only a single Gigabit Ethernet connector included, which is somewhat disappointing when compared to many competing motherboards. We have seen reasonably priced motherboards with dual Ethernet solutions, like ECS' KN1 SLI Extreme, which included a 10/100 Ethernet port along with the Gigabit port embedded in the chipset.