Budarow:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/productfiles/117image3.jpg Sapphire photo of the board, but yeah, I have the crossfire edition which has no lights, and is pretty black
Warning, this is a tad long, but as promised here's my basic review of the motherboard:
System:
Sapphire PURE Crossfire Advantage
512mb Corsair low latency RAM (Would have preferred a gb, but it?s not possible at the moment)
AMD 64 S939 3000+
Sapphire X800GTO
Western Digital 80gb SATA
Maxtor 160gb SATA
Water cooled
Warning: This board has issues with certain SATA hard drives, details available in the bios update readme.txt and inf files, predominantly Seagate drives
The first thing you?ll notice about the board is the box, it has that ?Sapphire? feel to it, very much a piece of stylish design in its own right. Insides are organised well, while there is no anti-static bag containing the motherboard, adequate protection has been provided. All the basis are included, cables for IDE, floppy, the onboard firewire, SATA, along with all the usual bundled items.
The board itself is large, perhaps an inch wider and an inch and a half longer than most boards, but it still fitted snugly into the case. The board layout is well considered, nearly all the sections that require access have ample space for a hand. I say nearly, because the CMOS jumper is tucked neatly away under the SATA ports, which while neat, could lead to a little inconvenience in clearing the CMOS. The standard securing clips for the PCI-Express cards are also slightly harder to get at, assuming you have a full card cooler, which I happen to have. It?s not impossible, but a lot more problematic that it could have been. The power plugs are in relatively easy to access places, the four pin additional plug up in the top left of the board while the main 20 pin plug is mid board on the far right, just below the floppy. However, the pictures available on Sapphires website show the layout more than adequately.
The initial problem came with my own RAM, one stick of it was causing problems, unfortunately this affects later testing somewhat, I?d have preferred a full gig for the 3DMark tests and graphics overclocking. A bios update would be recommended, the menus changed significantly between the two versions. The bios number is harder to find, however, they should probably have all shipped with 20050811, yes, that is a date in American format. The newer version is 20050930, available from Sapphire techs website. The bios, Phoenix Award, has some differences to the bios I?m used to, but it?s easily negotiated none the less. Most users will want to change at least one setting in the bios, turning off the fullscreen ATI Xpress logo that overlays the usual test screen. I?ve yet to try and overcclocking, but the bios appears to be bale to handle voltage regulators, and other such useful items. It may be advisable to make the SATA controller treat the SATA drives as IDE drives, JBOD essentially, in the integrated peripherals, it increases the boot time some.
Back to the board, namely, the northbridge. The heat sink certainly takes the heat off it, but I?m willing to bet that it needs some active cooling, perhaps even a section of a water loop, because the heatsink gets too hot to touch within a matter of minutes during stress situations such as 3DMark, and one can only assume this will extend to games too.
The board has so far lived up to the expectations I have of Sapphire, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they don?t make the boards. The board is visually identical to both the board with SATA2 (I?m certain the Southbridge is the same, too), and not just the other Sapphire board, it?s practically identical to the PC Partner board, even the silk screen appears to match, all that appears to be different is the branding, this board doesn?t have the same style stamp on the underside as the Sapphire Gruber board, it?s almost a generic board with some branding. Who actually makes it, I have little clue.
The board uses the same brand of components as the Gruber, Teapo capacitors and mosfets, which is, as a review from AnandTech on the Gruber board state, an unknown company. We will have to wait to see if this affects performance or life of the board.
A general overview of the board is about all I can provide, I haven?t the technical know-how to do any further testing and investigation of the board. When I can, I?ll post some overclocks on the CPU.