Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast
by Wesley Fink on July 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance
It should come as no surprise that high performance video has little impact on Winstone performance. Whether the top ATI card, the comparable NVIDIA 6800 Ultra, or the latest NVIDIA 7800GTX, Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation 2004 results are pretty much the same at the same CPU speed. The lone exception is the 1.5 to 2 point boost given to Business Winstone 2004 by NVIDIA video cards. We have commented on this before, but still cannot explain why NVIDIA cards perform better in Business Winstone. This is most clearly demonstrated when you compare performance of the ATI X850XT PE at 28 to the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra and 7800GTX at about 2 points higher.
PCMark 2004 appears to slightly favor ATI video cards in their performance score, while the newest PCMark 2005 seems to be the opposite - providing better results for the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra with the 7800GTX with a substantial lead in the PCMark 2005 score.
There is little to distinguish or detract from the Sapphire ATI in General Performance benchmarks. The Sapphire board is competitive with the best Socket 939 Athlon 64 boards that we have tested.
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QueBert - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I like the white, but not a big fan of red. As for it being the "first white motherboard we've seen" There was a really sweet looking one by I believe, Epox. Platinum colored PCB with blue and gold on the board. The color scheme of this Sapphire is different, and different is good. I hate green/red PCB's.beorntheold - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Under Gaming Performance:"... If you keep in mind that the orange bar represents the same NVIDIA 6800 Ultra used to test the other boards in this review, you can clearly see that the Sapphire ATI is at or near the top in most game tests..."
There is either an error in the graph or in the text - because the orange bar clearly says
nV 7800 GTX.
Olaf van der Spek - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
> This number is meaningless as far as hard disk performance is concerned as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second.What exactly is meant here?
Isn't more completed operations per second better?
Wesley Fink - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
I meant that the operations per second is meaningless as a SPECIFICATION of hard drive performance. Yes, more operations per second is better, but you will never see iPeak ops/sec quoted as a specification.roel - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
And what about support for linux?Will it boot? Will it be fast as well?
I'd like to know.
roel
kevykev - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
What is with the stupid fish names though? How ridiculous.TheInvincibleMustard - Saturday, July 30, 2005 - link
Actually, that was one of the first things to catch my eye ... Not the fish, but the jaguar, with the silkscreened logo looking almost exactly the same as the automobile company (Google Images if you're curious). The actual leaping cat is positioned slightly differently between the two, but the similarity is remarkable.If I had better image manipulation on this machine I'm at, I'd whip up a side-by-side comparison to better illustrate (hehe) my point.
shoRunner - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
All i can say is drool, this definately looks like a very promising board, if they can fix the issue with the USB transfer rates(even without a fix its will still be very competative, how often do most ppl transfer huge amounts of data over USB?). What i still want to see is one of these boards with the integrate graphics and a DVI port.Stas - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Just as I expected: nVidia is whooped. ATi + AMD = PerformanceZebo - Friday, July 29, 2005 - link
Looks great Wes..cept for memory is to close together and not staggard and may present cooling problems between the sticks...plus the board looks like green snot, much prefer blacks, reds and blues.