Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200

Author: J. Micah Grunert
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/sapphire_pc-am2rd580/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.

As computers go, you can expect to pay top dollar for that top of the line performance. A real power house system  could cost upwards of a couple thousand, at least. But you don't necessarily have to shell out the big bucks to get a capable computer. Thankfully, Sapphire is pushing their way into the market as a budget parts provider. And that's not to say that their components are cheap. Though quite affordable, the PC parts Sapphire manufacturers are both well designed and well fabricated.

Take for quick example, the pair of Sapphire graphics cards we recently reviewed. They both run ATI based GPUs, and both held their own when tested against some comparable rivals. The Sapphire X1650 Pro graphics card quite impressed me, whilst the Sapphire X1300 XT became the embodiment of what a budget card (both at about $100 USD) should be.



And now, we move onto motherboards. The Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200, also tagged as the PC-AM2RD580, is quite unique. Perhaps the most striking of its aspects, that being of the white PCB design. I've never really seen that before. The AMD AM2 processor support  is really nice, especially nice. And the ATI RD580 chip set quite impresses. Did I mention CrossFire?


Now this may be a budget board, so we shouldn't expect unparalled performance and blinding speeds. But I have a feeling, a hunch if you will, that this board might turn out to be pretty nice. So, let us roll up our sleeves and put the Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 through its paces. I'm all ready.

The Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200 is yet another board to use the ATI RD580 chipset design, but for the AM2 platform.  This is our first review of an AM2 RD580 board review, but we had encountered our first RD580 chipset back when we performed our review of the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Socket 939 motherboard. I was one of the two here who had the lucky opportunity to review that particular Asus board, and was more than impressed with the performance aspects of the RD580 chip set.

Also dubbed the Xpress 3200, the RD 580 was ATIs response to long time rival Nvidia. For some years now, the nForce chip set, in all its incarnations, has been the leader where it pertained to performance and over clocking. ATI just had to do something. Using TSMC's 110-nanometer manufacturing process, this north bridge handles a considerable amount of work, even given its rather small package. It's only 39 square millimeters in die area, while packed with just over 22 million transistors.



What does this all mean? Well, the Xpress 3200 chip set can, in some cases, attain HyperTransport and FSB speeds well above 1200 MHz, if not close to 1300 MHz if tweaked and cooled. Insane speeds are abound with the removal of the internal clock divisor from this chip. This allows for a synchronous speed between the north bridge and Hyper Transport speeds. I can't wait to fire up some of the gaming bench marks.



And speaking of gaming, the PCI-Express configuration make me smile. With a total of 40 lanes available, and 32 dedicated right off the bat to graphics (Dual 16x CrossFire anyone?), we have come to expect some serious frame rates when playing with the RD580.  Even keeping in mind that Cabless CrossFire with even X1900GT cards do not have significant speed degradations with even dual 8X PCI-E (read our study of 8X vs 16X Cabless CrossFire X1900GT and X1800GTO articles for more details), future considerations should be taken into account for even higher performing cards.

Those 8 remaining PCI-E lanes have been split up even further. Four of them handle all of the I/O responsibilities, such as the USB, LAN, IEEE1394 and the such. The other four lanes chat with the ATI SB600, the little south bridge that closes the chip set loop. In the past, ATI had coupled their RD580 north bridge with the ULi M1575 south bridge. Kinda silly, considering that ULi is owned by Nvidia, ATIs biggest, and only real rival. This ATI original south bridge has really made ATI a top contender in the chip set market, and should keep them more than competitive for some years to come.

Package (Bundle) and Impressions




Wow! That box sure is shiny!

But exterior packaging aside, which is very nice, Sapphire does make a concerted effort to impress us with the features this particular board has. These features would list as follows.

Rear I/O Ports




Internal I/O Connectors
All of these connectors are the perfect standard for any motherboard. That number of USB ports is expected, and 8 channel audio is demanded. But what happened to the Optical audio connector? I'd like that. And maybe a rear SATA port for big file backups. I am more than a little saddened to see those connections unexpectedly absent. But there are two missing that should be there, regardless.

The board only comes with one GigE connector, even though the Xpress 3200 can handle two, and one more IDE connector would have been appreciated.  So when it come to connectivity, the Pure CrossFire 3200 from Sapphire is a little lacking for hardcore enthusiasts but possibly just right for those who don't need all the connectivity and want to save a few bucks.

When we look to the hardware bundle, it seems to be adequate for this particular board. What did I find in this box anyways?


Okay, let's run through these little goodies quickly. I really liked the user manual, as it is very well laid out and very informative. Having good documentation is important, and Sapphire should be commended for such. The quick install guide helps, but could have simply been the forward section of the user manual. No complaints there though. The driver CD has all those necessary files, but checking for the most recent driver packages for this particular board, or any board for that matter, is recommended. Sapphires site has these updates. Specifically, they are the ATI chip set drivers, ATI AHCI/RAID drivers, RealtekHDA audio drivers(8 Channels), SiL S_ATAII Non-Raid drivers, and the Marvel PCI-E Gigabit LAN Drivers. And for an added bonus, Trend Micro Internet Security 2004 is included on the disc. This just a simpler version of their Internet Firewall software, and really doesn't draw my attention. The software disc comes with PC Backup, Privacy Protector 2005, Recover Lost Data Trial, and Spyware X-terminator trial. My only response to these would be that there are plenty of free, and better alternatives out there for your downloading pleasure.

As for the games DVD,  you'll get Brothers in Arms:Road to Hill 30, Prince of Persia:The Warrior Within, Tony Hawk's Underground 2, and Richard Burns Rally. Sounds like a pretty sweet collection. And it would be, if they all weren't demos. Yes, a disc full of demo games. Oh well, if not the full versions, it is a few hours of sampled enjoyment from some very fun titles.

And I wasn't terribly impressed with the cable package either. A meer, absolutely paltry two SATA cables for a board with eight ports. There should have been four SATA cables included, four at a bare minimum. Flat ribbon cables? I think not! I will use nothing but rounded cables in my rig.

But enough about those little extras, let's get down to the meat of this article, the board itself. And perhaps the most obvious aspect of the Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200 is the white PCB of which it is constructed. I've seen green boards, and blue boards, black and red, but never white. I've seen black PCBs for video cards, but never before have I seen white. I think it looks nice, and the red silk screening and traces really speak to the ATI chip set branding.

When we take a closer look, a few things become apparent. If you take a peek at the following picture, you'll see some unused traces that would hint towards the possibility of a POST code display. Something that's really handy for debugging a troublesome hardware setup. And towards the front of the board, there is another blank trace that could accept another (or different) CMOS chip. In fact, there would seem to be homes for a lot of missing parts. Hmmm, I wonder?



Well, it didn't take much digital sleuthing on my part, but discovered what those blank traces are for. Sapphire has a higher end versions of the Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200, that being the Sapphire Advantage CrossFire 3200. The Advantage could be considered the bigger, badder, better brother of the Pure. Up the connectivity, a few more features, add a little to the price tag, and you have the better version.




One thing that I quite appreciate is the fanless chip set heat sinks. There's enough noise coming from my case without having to mix in some little tiny fans. And both the north and south bridge heat sinks do cool sufficiently. In fact, they both cool quite well. I had even noticed that tiny little heat sink pasted onto one hot component. I couldn't tear off the little cooler to see what part was hidden beneath (probably an SCR), but that extra little bit of engineering investment is quite nice, and very much appreciated. Oh, and take note of that little red LED just to the right of the heat sink. Yes, there are surface mounted LED running lights on this board. They don't really do much, but do look nice.



Drifting over to the memory slots, the color coding helps in installing your RAM. If you really want that dual channel memory to happen, then keep paired slices of memory in the same colored slots. Otherwise, your memory will default to single channel.




Poking around a little further, I saw the cutest thing. Take a look at this little Ferrite Core I've highlighted. It's so tiny, I almost missed it. They may look insignificant to most, but these Ferrite Cores perform a very important function. the help to cleanup and reduce the occurrence of electromagnetic fields and electromagnetic interference. Quite simply, all those traces and components on a motherboard can affect each other. All of these buzzing electrons can create something akin to an antenna, and can in fact generate weak EM fields. These fields can wreak havoc with a computer, so cleaning them up helps. Seeing these minuscule Ferrite Cores would suggest that Sapphire is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to providing a clean electrical environment. And just for comparison, take a look at these regular sized Ferrite Cores. These ones are located up towards the voltage regulator modules (which is passivly cooled). Yeah, the big yellow ones. I don't think I need to highlight them.



What else, what else? Did I mention the surface mounted power and reset buttons. These are really nice. Of course, you would use the external power and reset buttons. But with bench testing a system, or perhaps working on the board extensively, swapping out parts, these little buttons do come in useful. I would have liked to have seen a CMOS clear button too. Sapphire employed the old jumper method, which is pretty dated. Oh, and did you notice that blank trace in the bottom right of the above picture? Looks sort of like where a CMOS would be soldered into place. Oh, and look at this picture.



Something isn't right here. Notice how the double wide CrossFire cards will block off the PCI slot. In an instant, upgrades are rendered impossible, unless you can find some magic PCI card that's only a couple centimeters tall. Unfortunately many boards that try to keep legacy PCI support end up with this problem, but some have also avoided it, so caveat to those who absolutely must have the PCI and also CrossFire support.

As for the general layout, it's nice enough, but could be better. For one, I don't like how all of the SATA ports are scattered about. You have 4,2,2 when it should be on big cluster of eight. And with better labeling. Another thing to point out is the spacing of the PCI-E and single PCI slot. If one were to run a pair of double wide ATI cards in CrossFire, then your single PCI slot would be lost. You still have that lone PCI-E 1x slot, but that really doesn't help much. And the retention clips for the PCI-E cards are close to impossible. Any card with a fat enough heat sink will completely obscure this tab. I would have much preferred the curved plastic tab affair instead. With that method you can at least get to the tab and remove the graphics cards.




After looking at the board layout, let's take a look at the BIOS.

As for the BIOs, Sapphire chose to use the Phoenix Award BIOS system. This BIOS structure is pretty simple with root menu navigation. It does seem to get a little heavy at times, especially with the sheer abundance of tweakable settings. In particular, those voltage settings. My first indication would suggest that this board could be a sweet overclocker, but only time will tell.

But first, what boot screen do you prefer? The verbose, or the babe?



So we start with the obvious intro screen and try to choose where to go next.




The Advanced BIOS features are pretty standard, so nothing special there.




Advanced Chip set Features seem just a little thin. But the DRAM configurations within, they are ample, almost to the point of excessive. I can't wait to start playing around. And those PCI-E Configurations could be more than a little interesting.



Integrated Peripherals. Nothing much to write home about



OverClock/Voltage Features! Yes! We've hit gold! I'm definitely going have to play around with that.



Power Management and PnP/PCI Configuration don't really matter that much, so well leave them be.


And what of our PC Health Status? Yes, it looks like it's still alive.

So what does all this spell? The BIOS for this Sapphire board would suggest that it may very well be an overclockers dream. I certainly hope it is. Oh and if you're wondering about those really long BIOS menus, such as the DRAM Configuration, I'll explain. Though I would truly wish for some crazy monitor that would give us extra long BIOS screens, that's just the result of a cutting and pasting on my part. It's simply so readers can examine all of the BIOS features in one fell glance. And it looks cool too.

Now how about some benchmarks?

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.

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.
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.
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.

It is my preference to get these two benchmarks done and out of the way with first. Especially since they are excruciatingly long (about 1 hour each), and for how they help in diagnosing memory stability issues. Those issues aren't anything destructive mind you, just intricacies that can cause stability issues. In fact, one issue these two benchmarks were able to sniff out involved that afore mentioned issue with regards to memory timings. Initially, the timings we would usually employ for the Corsair PC8500 XMS2 modules would be 4-4-4-12/2T. Unfortunately, this Sapphire board didn't like those figures, so we set the timings to auto in the BIOS. More on those timings later. But first, the benchmarks.



The Sapphire came close, but really didn't take any medals home.



And the same can be said for content creation.

Okay, now as I had mentioned earler (and more than once as my memory recalls), there was that difficulty in running that Corsair PC8500 XMS2 memory at the 4-4-4-12/2T speeds. These modules hit those timings no problem, but we had to let the BIOS decide for us in this case.

So, how does the Sapphire fare in the realm of memory?









Well, I'd say that the Sapphire teetered between second and third place. Not bad, but not too good.



Sorry, I guess that our Sapphire Pure CrossFire board has just a little difficulty remembering things. Figuratively speaking of course.

Just a couple of simple tests here, and we'll start with HDTach. First SATA, then IDE, and round it out with USB.



Low...



Average...



Average...

How about WinRAR?



I'm not impressed. Perhaps some media encoding will fare some better results.

From what we've seen so far, I don't really expect a phenomenal media encoding. After all, the Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 is a budget board, and thus far, has delivered budget board results.



Can we say "Ouch!"



Again, the Sapphire falls just a little short of all its brethren.



And the same results are seen yet again. But these should be granted some degree of latitude. Though these figures thus far have the Sapphire trailing the pack, this in no way means that the Pure CrossFire 3200 is not worth a second chance. To translate the figures we have been seeing into real world values, you're honestly splitting hairs and mincing over a few extra seconds here and there.

But we still have our favorite set of benchmarks yet to run. That's right! It's onto the games.

Let's see, who goes first?



Self explanatory...



Again, self explanatory.

First Comanche, then Halo.



Not bad...



Not good...

Light sabers and rail guns, here we come!



We might call this a tie for second place. Too bad there's no bronze medal.



Kinda looks like the last page.

Now I can honestly say that I didn't really expect the Sapphire to trounce the likes of Asus. I had hoped at the very least that it might have given both our MSI and Gigabyte boards a run for their money. In some cases yes, but in most of them, no. But we still have to play around with some overclocking. I am ever so slightly hopeful that given the ATI RD580 chipset design, that this board will see some  handsome FSB speeds. So let's get to it.
 

Now then, let's see what kind of bandwidth we can squeeze out of this board. And as with any board, flashing to the latest BIOS update helps. I had tried some overclocking with the stock BIOS that our Sapphire board came flashed with, and the best I couldn't really push things very far. Stability issues were abound. The board had this nasty habit of absolutely hating restarts. It would more often than not, loose the FSB setting, reverting back to it's 200MHz stock bus rate. It also hung up on restarts. Nothing more than a black screen and not a single post code squeaked.

So, I flashed it. And once flashed, the overclocking went much, much smoother. But there was a hitch involved. For some reason, the board didn't seem to like those 4-4-4-12 memory timings we had set in the beginning. So, to get it running we reset the memory to 5-5-5-18, and that seemed to work wonders. In the end, our final score came out to be a 524.8 x 2MHz memory speed, for a total of 1049.6MHz memory. As for the processor itself, with the help of a BIOS update, lower memory timings, and a lot of hope, we managed a decent overclock. With an 8x CPU multiplier tied to a 333MHz bus, our final rating of 2,664MHz (2.6Ghz) wasn't half bad. But it obviously wasn't that good either.

Because of stability issues (during the overclocking), we had decided that a stable 333MHz bus was far better than some sketchy 340MHz bus. So that's where we'll be testing. We only have a few integral benchmark test we run for over clocked boards. Here they are.


These should give use some good indications as to our overclocking efforts.






Well, it would seem that the Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200 had a few instances of moderate success in the RightMark memory analysis during it's over clocked stage. And it would seem especially during the bandwidth testing. Even though the Sapphire fell behind with the other benches, it is possibly that a different board layout just happened to optimize the memory bandwidth. What about SiSoft Sandra memory testing?



A modest improvement. But we can see some better figures when it come to WinRAR.



But, again, it can't compete with its others when playing Doom 3.



So, what's an enthusiast to make of these numbers; both stock and over clocked? Perhaps there will be some enlightened thoughts within my conclusion.

I had found with our Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 that there were some attractive notables. The white PCB is is probably the most obvious to start. Too bad I can't find any white graphics cards out there. Hint, hint Sapphire. The bundle is adequate, but could have been better. Some other things with this board? The board is a very viable choice for the casual enthusiasts and those looking for a performance board on a budget.

As I had indicated earlier, there is the Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 Advantage. This board is most likely the same PCB as the Sapphire we tested, but with those extra little goodies and higher performance parts. If given the chance, I would quite like to review the Sapphire Advantage version. Maybe pit it head to head against the Sapphire Pure version. I'd run every bench mark we've got and whip up some comparison of dollars versus FSB speeds. Could be interesting.

But as for our Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200, I can't really suggest it to anyone looking for the be all and end all of performance boards. This is a "budget" performance board, with a price tag 20-25% lower than that of high end performance boards.  Performance wise, it can't really compare with the other higher priced boards we tested. There might be some possibility of slight performance increase with yet another BIOS update, but this wouldn't make the difference look like night and day.

Though, if one were looking for a budget board, this would be a good choice. Certainly, there are other, better AM2 mother boards to be had. But most every AM2 board comes with a pricing premium. The PC-AM2RD580, should ring the till at about $150 USD, far less than the $200 plus boards we tested against.


Match the Sapphire Pure CrossFire board with a couple of the Sapphire X1650 Pro graphics cards I'd reviewed recently, and you've got the starts to a very affordable computer. I'm sorry though to say that extreme overclockers need not apply. At least not until Sapphire releases another BIOS update. But there is the Advantage version which may prove to play more to the overclocker's market.  Overall a good board for "the rest of us".

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