Product Reviews

Sapphire's Pure Innovation PI-A9RX480 motherboard is aimed at gamers and uses ATI's Radeon Xpress-200 chipset, rather than the nVidia nForce 4 chipset we're used to seeing.

The board has only a single PCI-E x16 slot, so it can't support dual-card setups such as SLI or CrossFire. What it is good at, though, is overclocking. The BIOS has a massive range of adjustable settings, which means that you can push your AMD Socket 939 processor just about as far as it will go. Needless to say, these features will appeal only to those computer users who know what they are doing.

Even

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if you decide to leave the default settings, performance is excellent. Its Shopper application benchmark score of 118 is great with the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor and 1GB of DDR memory installed in a dual-channel configuration. There is absolutely no doubt that this is a high-performance motherboard.

The Pure Innovaton provides a good range of storage options, including four SATA and two SATA2 ports, which can be used in a RAID configuration. It also has the usual range of USB2, FireWire, LAN and 7.1 surround sound outputs that are common on most motherboards. With two x1 PCI-E and two PCI slots, it provides plenty of room for installing add-on cards in the future.

With so much going for it, this would seem to be an excellent choice of motherboard. Unfortunately, the high price counts heavily against it. It's much more expensive than the competition, and an equivalent board using nVidia's nForce 4 chipset can be had for less than £100. In fact, you can even buy an SLI motherboard such as ECS's KN1 Extreme SLI for less than £100.

The Pure Innovation shows what is possible with an ATI chipset, but it needs to be cheaper if it's going to compete.