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So, I've got the Sapphire Pure board. Guess I'll need a few other parts. Let's see what the hardware shelves have to offer.

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor (Socket AM2, 2.6 GHz, two cores)
• XFX GeForce 7800 GT video card
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• 2*512MB Corsair PC2-8500 memory @ 5-5-5-18/2T
• OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply

This is a pretty standard setup for testing an AM2 system, but with one major consideration, the memory timings. That particular Corsair memory will race along with timings dipping down to 4-4-4-12/2T, which is where we like to run it. But we had to run this memory in Auto and let the BIOS choose the timings for us. Why you ask? I'll explain come the Overclocking section. But first the, the complete set of benchmarks we ran.

• Business Winstone
• Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• SiSoft Sandra Memory Analyzer
• WinRAR
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• XviD Video Encoding
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• Rightmark Audio Encoding
• Call of Duty
• Doom 3
• Comanche 4
• Halo
• Jedi Knight 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004

The drivers we used for our testing were pretty simple. Rather than use the drivers that came with our install CD, I opted instead to go to Sapphires site and download the latest packages. Some of them , such as the chipset driver package, had been updated. Others, like the audio drivers, probably won't change for months. Graphics wise, the Nvidia ForceWare 91.47 drivers were used, as they are the most recent from day of testing.

And our competition.

• Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
• MSI K9N SLI Platinum
• Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5
• Asus P5W DH Deluxe
  

It looks like we have some very strong contenders in the ring; three AM2 boards (and our Sapphire included makes four). The common chip we used for this review was the AMD AM2 Athlon FX-62 5000+  processor.

So, let's get onto the benchmarks.

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