Sapphire, ATI's 100% partner
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Date: 19.10.2005 |
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3DNews.ru: Moving to the talk about motherboards, let's first of all help our readers sort out with the marking of Sapphire produce.
A. Thompson: The marking of Sapphire motherboards is easy enough even to the most unsophisticated consumer. I am repeating it that for our produce we use solely ATI's chipset, so the marking of the boards gives a transparent clue to the name of the chipset used.
All Sapphire's motherboards are divided into the four categories – Innovation, CrossFire, Performance, and Element, with each category representing a sector of the market. While the first two categories, Innovation and CrossFire, are aimed at building the most powerful boards of approximate retail price $179 and $119, respectively, the Performance series of the price about $89 appears to be solutions for the mainstream class, and the Element of the price about $69 is aimed at the entry-level systems.
The name of a Sapphire board can be examined on a typical example - PI-A9 RS480, where PI stands for Pure Innovation, A9 – Socket 939, RS480 is the respective name of the version of ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. Therefore, a board aimed at Socket 478 for an Intel processor will be marked as I4, LGA75 – I7, and AMD Socket 754 – as A7. The suffices denoting chipsets are changed accordingly - RS400, RD400, RC410, or RS480, RX480, RX482, and additional ending may be added: M stands for the form factor mATX, and B – for the form factor BTX. That's about all of the intricacies.
3DNews.ru: Quite recently, Sapphire started promotion of its motherboards on the new PURE line. What is special about this series?
A. Thompson: The new generation of Sapphire's motherboards promoted in the Pure series fully fits within the above classification of target groups - Innovation, CrossFire, Performance, and Element. To some extent, motherboards of the Pure series can be called a quintessence implementation of ATI's technologies in practice.
Sapphire Pure motherboards are presented by the two lines: Pure – for AMD processors, and Pure II – for Intel processors. In the most performance-oriented Pure Innovation class aimed primarily at the advanced users and overclockers, we have presented the ATX motherboard Pure Innovation PI–A9RX480 built on the chipset combination ATI Express 200 (RX480) + SB450 for AMD Socket 939 processors.
This board is aimed at operation with AMD processors of series Sempron, Athlon64, FX, and X2, offers support for the dual-channel DDR400 memory, PCI-Express x16 bus, offers two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots, eight USB 2.0 ports, two modern ports for SATA-II (RAID 0, 1) storage and four SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1. There are also IEEE1394 ports, Gigabit LAN, 7.1-channel HDA (Azalia). Pure Innovation PI–A9RX480 offers the most flexible BIOS settings, as well as system-wide tuning to attain the maximum performance with the stability preserved.
The Pure CrossFire series is presented by two novelties in the ATX form factor. The version Pure CrossFire II PC-I7RD400 built on the combination RD400 + SB450 is aimed at operation with Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 processors with support for FSB 533, 800, or 1066 MHz, 2-channel DDR400 memory, offers two PCI-E x16 slots as should be for the CrossFire technology, as well as two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports, support for SATA RAID 0, 1, 8-channel HD Audio, 10/100 and GBit LAN, IEEE1394 ports, etc.
The CrossFire version for Socket 939 AMD processors is presented by the PC-A9RD480 board built on the combination RD480 + SB450 having approximately similar characteristics.
The Performance series is also presented by two boards in the ATX form factor: the version Pure Performance II PP-I7RS400 built on the chipset combination RS400 + SB400 for LGA775 P4 processors, and the Pure Performance PP-A9RS480 series built on the combination RS480 + SB400 for Socket 939 AMD chips. The special feature of both these boards is the full-featured graphic core ATI Radeon X300 integrated into the chipset together with the full-featured PCI Express x16 bus, as well as an implementation of 6-channel audio, and GBit LAN.
Finally, the mass series Pure Element which currently is made up of two boards in the mATX form factor. These are Pure Element II PE-I7RC410M built on the combination RC410 + SB400 for Socket 775 P4 processors, and Pure Element PE-A7RS482M on the combination RS482 + SB400 for Socket 754 AMD processors. These boards also feature in the availability of integrated graphic core ATI Radeon X300, as well as support for the single-channel DDR400 memory, a PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI slots, SATA RAID 0, 1, 6-channel Audio, and 10/100 MBit LAN.
Therefore, Sapphire covers not only the whole possible spectrum of retail demand but also any demands of system integrators in the most recent and powerful motherboards.
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