Board layout

As we mentioned earlier, Sapphire’s PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 board is based on ATI’s “Grouper” reference board for the XPRESS 200 chipset. Unlike the original “Bullhead” reference XPRESS 200 board, which was more of a proof-of-concept, “Grouper” was designed from the ground up for performance and high clock speeds. ATI feels that no punches were pulled in designing Grouper – like many reference motherboards the Grouper board was overbuilt – so the PI-A9RX480 starts off from a solid base.

The most distinctive feature you’ve no doubt noticed is the board’s white PCB. In addition to the white PCB, you’ll note the board’s red memory sockets and IDE connectors, while the PCI-E slots and SATA ports are colored burgundy. Definitely an interesting color combination don’t you think? In addition, like DFI’s LANPARTY boards, the PURE Innovation’s slots glow under UV light.

Power/reset buttons on bottom of the board next to SATA ports

Power LED above battery

But an exotic coloring scheme isn’t the only technique Sapphire employs to target enthusiasts, the board also sports power and reset buttons on the board itself, which may come in handy for starting up or resetting the board during troubleshooting (it certainly made things easy for us during testing). Sapphire also outfits the board with red LEDs for the power LED and system standby LED. But that’s not all, as Sapphire even includes Serial ATA and IDE drive activity LEDs! One LED is responsible for Serial ATA ports 0-3, while a second LED is used for port 4. Finally, Sapphire uses two LEDs for the primary and secondary IDE controllers. All this adds up to give you a wealth of information about your disk drives.

Another positive that the PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480 board has going for it is its passive cooling. Unlike nForce4 Ultra, and even ATI’s own XPRESS 200 reference boards, the PI-A9RX480 is able to get by completely with just heatsinks, no fan is required to keep the North Bridge of the chipset cool. Sapphire even employs heatsinks on the South Bridge and multiple voltage regulator modules – one massive heatsink sits near the VRM circuitry next to the CPU socket, while smaller, individual heatsinks can be found near the RX480 North Bridge. As we said earlier, ATI and Sapphire designed this board for high clock speeds.

Plenty of space for dual-slot graphics cards

Sapphire’s got more tricks up their sleeve for enthusiasts though. With the RADEON X850 XT series requiring a dual-slot cooler, Sapphire leaves plenty of room between the x16 PCI-E graphics slot and the first x1 PCI-E slot for a dual slot graphics card like the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition.

Capacitors sit close the CPU interface

But there is just enough room

The rest of the board’s layout is pretty good as well. While the area around the CPU socket is pretty crowded, we were able to mount our oversized AMD reference cooler with no problems. Sapphire doesn’t make any rookie mistakes such as placing the ATX power connector(s) in the way of the CPU fan, although it would’ve been nice to see the Silicon Image-powered SATA ports somewhere higher up on the board.

Sapphire’s implementation isn’t without its faults though. For instance, color-coded front panel headers for the power switch, power and HDD LEDs and reset switch would have been nice, color-coded DIMM sockets and USB/IEEE-1394 headers would have been a good idea as well. Many motherboard manufacturers have even gone so far as to offer color-coded SATA ports, so you can see which ports are slaved to the chipset, and which are mated to an external controller, but Sapphire doesn’t do any of this with their board. ASUS, DFI, MSI, and others offer rounded corners on their boards, but you won’t find that on the PI-A9RX480. You also won’t find a retention mechanism for the graphics card either.

By far our biggest gripe though are the cables bundled with the board. While the PI-A9RX480 supports up to six SATA hard drives, Sapphire only bundles one Serial ATA data cable with the board. That’s right, just one cable. While most enthusiasts probably have spare SATA data cables lying around from previous builds, this is still no excuse for Sapphire to skimp so aggressively. We also would have liked to see a USB header included with the board, as well as round IDE cables.