Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480
Our Test Systems & SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz) Sapphire PI-A9RX480 (Radeon Xpress 200) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 Pro CL 2-2-2-5 Radeon X800 XL On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.13 ATI Catalyst v5.10 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz) Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 Pro CL 2-2-2-5 Radeon X800 XL On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.13 ATI Catalyst v5.10 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 3: Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) Shuttle SD31P (Intel i945G) 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667 CL 3-2-2-8 Radeon X800 XL On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Intel INF 7.21.1003 ATI Catalyst v5.10 DirectX 9.0c |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ installed into our test rig. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.0GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).
;) CPU |
;) Multimedia |
;) Memory |
;) Hard Drive |
Our quick results with a few of SANDRA's built-in benchmarks didn't reveal anything unexpected. The Sapphire PI-A9RX480 performed on par with other system's we've tested when using the same Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor. The CPU and Multimedia benchmarks had the PI-A9RX480 performing just behind the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ powered reference system, and the Memory Bandwidth and File System benchmarks reported scores very similar to what we've seen when using this particular CPU and hard drive on nForce 4 SLI based motherboards.
