Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-AM2RD580

Richard's Thoughts:

The general performance is very good across the board and stability is great. The PC-AM2RD580 is the best RD580/SB600 motherboard we've tested to date and if you're after something for performance over features it's definately one worth considering. The only place we've found that sells the AM2 version is Komplett at £147. But then that begs the question, is a white based motherboard worth £57 more than the "advantage" version?

There's no doubting that the PC-AM2RD580 is at the expensive end of the market and considering what you get in the box along with the extras on the board it seems like the extra money is for the colour and some additional power regulation components that should help when it comes to overclocking. You're obviously paying for the engineering, overclocking and performance, but whether that extra stock performance differences are noticeable and whether or not the board will not be able to achieve what the PC-AM2RD580 has achieve here is questionable.

Yes, this board fits its pure nomenclature, mostly from the outside of the box, but after getting it home, the bundle and add-in card connectivity options fit closer in line with raw. It frustrates me that the PC-AM2RD580 95% of the way there, but it's missing some elements that could have been included if considered early on. The board is very bare and that makes my mind wonder where components could have been changed or relocated to improve the add-in card options. The board has almost the exact same layout as the PC-A9RD580 (socket 939 version) and many reviewers - including ourselves - didn't like the layout back then.

The PC-AM2RD580 has so much potential and speaks volumes but ultimately just falls short because of issues with the layout that I just can't ignore. I'm hoping that Sapphire's motherboard engineers will heed the suggestions and take them on board to make products that really round off the promising start that this board has shown us on a hardware level.

With a little polish, this board could be a top-rate choice as it already has the engineering prowess in terms of performance and stability right behind it. Until then, it is great for those who are looking for the performance, but don't care about the little extras, features, or design elements that should be there. It's not a universal recommendation, but a recommendation none the less.

Tim's Thoughts:

Rich has made some solid points here and I can understand his disappointments. I am as disappointed about the layout as Rich is, because the heart and lungs of the board work incredibly well. It just needs some more limbs so that it doesn't have to limp into battle with a layout that is open to the criticisms we've given it here.

Anyway, on top of Rich's testing, I put the board through a number of stress tests and then delved into a bit of overclocking in order to find out whether the PC-AM2RD580 is a good enough overclocker for us to ignore the layout issues. Afterall, overclockers aren't really that bothered when it comes to layout, as long as there is enough room to install their cooling solutions.

Overclocking: I shot for the maximum HTT clock speed using an Athlon 64 FX-62 with the multiplier set to 8.0x. Much like the Abit KN9 SLI I had to take it slowly, raising the HTT clock in small increments in order to get the board to boot at the higher frequencies. I set the LDT to 3.0x and then went in search of some high HTT clocks. I got the board running a pair of Prime 95 instances on our dual-core CPU with the HTT clock set to 255MHz. There were no problems to report at these frequencies, but if I increased the clocks any higher, the board booted at 200MHz HTT. I think that this is a bug in the BIOS - hopefully one that Sapphire can fix. When it is fixed, we should see a lot more headroom unlocked on the board.

While I was experimenting on the overclocking front, I came across some other niggles that started to get annoying after a while through force of habit. The F10 save & exit functionality didn't work at all. The BIOS exited fine, but no changes were saved at all - I even tried changing some simple things like the time and then pressing F10, but it didn't even manage to save that. Another point that I came across was resetting CMOS - it didn't seem to want to work, however much I tried. The only way I could reset CMOS was to remove the battery and leave the board unplugged for ten minutes - most other boards just require the jumper change that didn't work here.

Update: Sapphire sent us a full production board, since our sample was apparently pre-production, and the F10 save & exit plus CMOS reset issues were both fixed on the production board.

On top of those problems, I would like to see the BIOS organised a little better. As Rich mentioned during the review, it was annoying to have to scroll up and down the BIOS screens to change things that should really be right next to each other. All it takes is a little bit of optimisation and ergonomics. Once that is done, the BIOS will be just about perfect - it's already got all of the right ingredients in there, they just need to be mixed in the right order.

Stability: I put the board through our normal battery of stress tests with a pair of Radeon X1900 video cards installed for CrossFire. If you're not familiar with this, we subject the board to two instances of Prime 95, an instance of IOMeter and a Far Cry time demo looping at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF.

The first time I tried to run the test, I encountered some problems and the OS blue screened when I was loading Far Cry - I don't think the OS took the Catalyst drivers on too well when I installed them. Rather than troubleshooting the problem, I started afresh with a Windows XP reinstallation as I was pretty sure that it was related to my driver installation. Thankfully, once I'd got Windows running and up to date, there were no further problems to report; I then left the board running our stress test for a day.

I returned after nearly 29 hours to find that the board was still running completely fine. The north and south bridges were hot to the touch, but there was absolutely no sign of instability in Far Cry - it was still looping with the same frame rates we were seeing when the stress test started. On closing Far Cry, there were no errors reported in either Prime 95 instance, and IOMeter was still going strong and error-free. Awesome.

Final Thoughts...

Sapphire's PC-AM2RD580 is an incredibly solid motherboard that deserves recommendation for those who aren't worried by the lack of expansion options on both the I/O panel and on the board itself. There is still some work to do on the BIOS before the full potential of this board is unlocked; hopefully Sapphire will address these problems directly and we should see this board reach another level altogether on the overclocking front.

If the high price isn't an issue and the lack of expansion options doesn't concern you, Sapphire's PURE CrossFire PC-AM2RD580 is well worth considering at the heart of a Socket AM2/CrossFire system.