Based on ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset for Athlon 64 processors, the PI-A9RX480 has many of the bells and whistles you'd expect from a high-end enthusiast board, including PCI Express, Serial ATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, High Definition Audio, plenty of overclocking options, and a truly unique aesthetic. On appearance and specs alone, this board looks poised to make a big splash among gamers and enthusiasts. Join us as we dive in for a deeper look at the PI-A9RX480's features and performance to see if Sapphire has indeed created a classic.

The specs
For starters, we'll glance over the PI-A9RX480's spec sheet.

The PI-A9RX480 owes much of its functionality to ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, which is made up of the RX480 north bridge and SB450 south bridge components. At the north bridge, the RX480 serves up a 1GHz HyperTransport processor link and 22 lanes of PCI Express. Two of those PCI Express lanes are consumed by the chipset interconnect, which offers 1GB/sec of bandwidth between the north and south bridge chips, and consumes an additional two PCI-E lanes at the south bridge. Since ATI's RS450 south bridge only has two PCI-E lanes, all the board's PCI Express slots and peripherals hang directly off the north bridge.

With all of the board's PCI Express devices off the north bridge, the SB450 south bridge's four-port Serial ATA RAID controller has plenty of interconnect bandwidth at its disposal. Curiously, the integrated RAID controller supports RAID 0 and 1 arrays, but neither RAID 10 nor 0+1. The RS450 south bridge does support Intel's "Azalia" High Definition Audio standard, though. Like many other mobo manufacturers, Sapphire pairs the board's High Definition Audio controller with Realtek's ALC880 HD audio codec. (Sorry, we're fresh out of crab jokes.)

The SB450's a little lacking in the networking department, so Sapphire has recruited Marvell's 88E8052 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller. The board also features a two-port Silicon Image Serial ATA RAID controller that supports 300MB/sec transfer rates. That chip also has a PCI Express interface, leaving VIA's VT6307 Firewire controller as the only on-board component stuck on the PCI bus. Few things grate us more than seeing the performance of RAID or GigE controllers hampered by the pokey PCI bus, so we're pleased to see that Sapphire has all the board's high-bandwidth peripherals connected via PCI Express.