Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
The talk of Computex was ATI's new Crossfire dual-video solution for AMD and Intel, but those of you who have been following ATI's chipset development realize the road to Crossfire has been a long one - and one that continues. When AnandTech looked at the introduction of RX480/RS480 chipsets for AMD last November, we found the performance of the new chipsets very impressive. ATI had done a particularly excellent job targeting the enthusiast for the new chipset launch, but that realization seemed to come late in the chipset development process. This meant that this excellent chipset was largely ignored by motherboard manufacturers who had already pegged the new ATI parts for Micro ATX integrated video parts for OEMs.
To ATI's credit, they have stayed the course of targeting the enthusiast, with a firm conviction that they could win the enthusiast with the right stuff, and that with the enthusiast would come penetration of the AMD market. Along the way, we have seen the original Bullhead board give way to today's Grouper (Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480) and the upcoming Halibut (Crossfire AMD). Enthusiast-Level performance was an add-on for Bullhead, but Grouper and Halibut were designed from the ground up to satisfy the most demanding enthusiast.
The Intel side of the Radeon Xpress 200 came later, but ATI has also introduced, with little fanfare, the recent Jaguar board for Intel. This design will culminate in Stingray (Crossfire Intel), which ATI expects to introduce at the same time as Crossfire AMD. At that point, AMD and Intel will be equivalent ATI chipset options. While this chipset performance review talks about four main chipset solutions - AMD single GPU/Dual GPU and Intel Single GPU/Dual GPU - keep in mind that there are potentially 8 new chipset board combinations with the new ATI chipsets. There may also be an integrated graphics solution with any of these four combinations. Why would anyone want integrated graphics with this combination? Because you can run additional monitors simultaneously with the add-on graphics. This opens many interesting possibilities for multi-monitor solutions.
The Sapphire PURE Innovation is the first production Radeon Xpress 200 board that is clearly targeted at the AMD enthusiast, but there are other ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset boards on the way from Asus, MSI, DFI, ECS, Abit, TUL, ECS, and others. Our performance tests here are of the latest production Sapphire single-GPU RX480, but Sapphire and ATI tell us that performance of the Crossfire ATI should be exactly the same in single GPU mode. We will talk more about Jaguar/Crossfire Intel performance later in a Part 2 of this article. We also will ignore integrated graphics from a performance viewpoint, even though all options can provide integrated graphics if the necessary Radeon Xpress 200 north bridge is used. The integrated video solutions basically combine on-board ATI X300 graphics on either the AMD or Intel Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. You can read more about the performance of these integrated solutions in our review comparing ATI and Intel integrated graphics solutions.
Several days ago, we published benchmarks comparing Crossfire AMD to NVIDIA SLI and found Crossfire X850 XT to be very competitive with NVIDIA 6800 Ultra SLI - even with pre-release hardware and drivers. Today, we look more deeply at a production version of the ATI Grouper that will be launched by Sapphire next week. Grouper is the single GPU version of the Crossfire chipset, but it is otherwise identical to Crossfire AMD. The Sapphire PURE Innovation should perform as a chipset exactly the same as Crossfire AMD. How does Grouper perform compared to the best AMD chipsets on the market? What features will be available on ATI chipset boards? Of course, ATI has clearly targeted the AMD enthusiast with their new chipsets. With that in mind, the biggest question is whether or not the Sapphire Pure Innovation is worthy of consideration by AMD enthusiasts.
To ATI's credit, they have stayed the course of targeting the enthusiast, with a firm conviction that they could win the enthusiast with the right stuff, and that with the enthusiast would come penetration of the AMD market. Along the way, we have seen the original Bullhead board give way to today's Grouper (Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480) and the upcoming Halibut (Crossfire AMD). Enthusiast-Level performance was an add-on for Bullhead, but Grouper and Halibut were designed from the ground up to satisfy the most demanding enthusiast.
The Intel side of the Radeon Xpress 200 came later, but ATI has also introduced, with little fanfare, the recent Jaguar board for Intel. This design will culminate in Stingray (Crossfire Intel), which ATI expects to introduce at the same time as Crossfire AMD. At that point, AMD and Intel will be equivalent ATI chipset options. While this chipset performance review talks about four main chipset solutions - AMD single GPU/Dual GPU and Intel Single GPU/Dual GPU - keep in mind that there are potentially 8 new chipset board combinations with the new ATI chipsets. There may also be an integrated graphics solution with any of these four combinations. Why would anyone want integrated graphics with this combination? Because you can run additional monitors simultaneously with the add-on graphics. This opens many interesting possibilities for multi-monitor solutions.
The Sapphire PURE Innovation is the first production Radeon Xpress 200 board that is clearly targeted at the AMD enthusiast, but there are other ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset boards on the way from Asus, MSI, DFI, ECS, Abit, TUL, ECS, and others. Our performance tests here are of the latest production Sapphire single-GPU RX480, but Sapphire and ATI tell us that performance of the Crossfire ATI should be exactly the same in single GPU mode. We will talk more about Jaguar/Crossfire Intel performance later in a Part 2 of this article. We also will ignore integrated graphics from a performance viewpoint, even though all options can provide integrated graphics if the necessary Radeon Xpress 200 north bridge is used. The integrated video solutions basically combine on-board ATI X300 graphics on either the AMD or Intel Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. You can read more about the performance of these integrated solutions in our review comparing ATI and Intel integrated graphics solutions.
Several days ago, we published benchmarks comparing Crossfire AMD to NVIDIA SLI and found Crossfire X850 XT to be very competitive with NVIDIA 6800 Ultra SLI - even with pre-release hardware and drivers. Today, we look more deeply at a production version of the ATI Grouper that will be launched by Sapphire next week. Grouper is the single GPU version of the Crossfire chipset, but it is otherwise identical to Crossfire AMD. The Sapphire PURE Innovation should perform as a chipset exactly the same as Crossfire AMD. How does Grouper perform compared to the best AMD chipsets on the market? What features will be available on ATI chipset boards? Of course, ATI has clearly targeted the AMD enthusiast with their new chipsets. With that in mind, the biggest question is whether or not the Sapphire Pure Innovation is worthy of consideration by AMD enthusiasts.
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Avalon - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
This board sounds fantastic!Hacp - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Competative with similar Nforce4 boards(DFI LP) isn't enough. They need to beat the price by 5-10 dollars in order to regain the edge. I agree that the VTT options is awesome (for you BH-5 users), but in order to kill the current proven top Overclockers board, they need to be very competative with the DFI in terms of price.Also, I was wondering if they managed to fix the cold boot issue with these boards. If the cold boot issue is a non issue with these boards, and they are priced exactly the same as the DFI Lan Party boards, then it is a no brainer for BH-5/CH-5/UTT users as to which board to pick (unless they already are doing the 3.3 Rail Vdimm mod).
Also, the 2nd page, He art in the first sentence needs to be fixed, and in the first page, it says AMD in the first paragraph when its supposed to say ATI.
afrost - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
I don't think so, a lot of people complain about problems with the DFI.....and it has a super loud fan on the chipset which is difficult to replace because the video card is right on top of it.I personally would never buy a DFI....different people obviously have different priorities
If this board is rock solid stable like AT reported, then they will have a winner.
cryptonomicon - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
looks like a strong competitor, and here was a typo pg. 11"The Sapphire ATI chipset performs at least as fast as the best of nForcee4 chipset boards"
Mant - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
I think that was intentional. They're comparing the ATI to the "NForcee" by MVidia...like you can compare a Seiko watch to a BOLEXRyanVM - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
In the first pic of the motherboard, it clearly has 8 SATA ports. However, the next page lists the specs with 6 SATA ports and the next picture seems to confirm that. Is there indeed an 8 SATA port version as well?Wesley Fink - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
The pictures on page 4 were provided by Sapphire and are earlier prototypes. The actual production version we tested is pictured on page 5 and has 6 (not 8) SATA ports. We apologize for the confusion. There are indeed pads for 8 SATA ports on the production board, so there could be further developments.ncage - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
What i like:Performance in general
good audio quality (im wondering if it supports any of the eax extensions though which would be great if it did. Would elimante the need for a sound card.)
What i don't like:
bad USB2 performance. This would affect me big time. I have a pro consumer camera (8MP Olympus C-8080) and i usually transfer a bunch of images at a time from my camera to my computer so this is definitly a disapointment.
I really like nvidia as a company. Their driver team has from the start been top notch. I think that is one of the things that led to their popularity. I generally have always gone with nvidia except in the 9800 pro days because you know why. I currently own a 6600gt which i love. Anyways the only thing that upset me that nvidia did was to take out soundstorm out of thier chipsets. I hope ATI bringing high end audio will force nvidia to reconsider. Nvidia knew that a lot of customers were asking for soundstorm back yet they still wouldn't put it back in. I just don't understand this.
I hope thier are boards produced that don't have dual video card abilites because of price. I really don't want two video cards. I only occasional play games and im not going to spend 500-900 on two video cards. So we shall see how this plays out.
bob661 - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
The mobo manufacturers were griping about the price. Also, I believe the demand was too low. Yes I know lots of geeks liked it but we're a small percentage of the market.BPB - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
"Today, we look more deeply at production version of the ATI Grouper that will be launched by Sapphire next week."So, when do we actually see these? If it's by end of Summer, great. If not, it may just be too late. I think most people who've waited for ATI to get this out have already gone to nVidia. I know my buddy has.
Also, regarding Crossfire, can an AIW X800XT PCIe work with a plain old X800XT PICe?