The board
One of the first things you'll notice about the PI-A9RX480 is its daring color scheme. The white board is populated with red and burgundy ports and slots that glow under UV light, making for a striking first impression.

Maybe it's the white board playing tricks with my eyes, but the PI-A9RX480's layout looks incredibly spacious from above. The board owes at least some of its uncluttered landscape to tiny Serial ATA and Gigabit Ethernet chips that are barely bigger than an audio codec.

Keeping with the clean theme, edge-mounted power connectors ensure that power cables won't clutter the board, at least with traditional ATX cases that mount the power supply unit above the motherboard. However, routing cable to the four-pin ATX 12V connector, which is mounted on the top edge of the board, will be a nightmare for upside-down cases like Antec's P180 and Silverstone's Temjin TJ06.

Despite its generally uncluttered layout, the PI-A9RX480 gets a little crowded around the CPU socket. A couple of taller capacitors flank the heatsink retention bracket, and passive north bridge and VRM coolers are a little close for comfort. Fortunately, the heat sinks are short enough to accommodate massive CPU coolers like Zalman's CNPS7700-AlCu.

Things start to spread out as we move down the board, with plenty of room below the PCI Express x16 slot. The extra space ensures that double-wide graphics card coolers won't block any of the board's expansion slots, which is a good thing considering how few there are. Curiously, though, the x16 slot lacks a graphics card retention clip. One would think that Sapphire, which also manufacturers graphics cards, would have included something to anchor them to the board.

While it's easy to understand the motivation behind leaving so much space below the PI-A9RX480's PCI Express x16 slot, it's odd that Sapphire has also left a lot of room below the board's last PCI slot. I've never seen a double-wide PCI card, and would certainly rather have a third PCI slot than the extra clearance.

Sapphire neatly consolidates all of the PI-A9RX480's storage ports in the bottom right-hand corner of the board. Despite having six Serial ATA ports, our board came with only one SATA cable. At least the cable was red, but we'd prefer to see more in the box.

The PI-A9RX480's spacious layout carries over to the port cluster, which has a huge gap between its PS/2 ports and other goodies. At first, I suspected that the gap was to allow better air flow for the board's passive VRM cooler. However, the included I/O shield walls off the gap, restricting air that might have flowed freely over the VRM cooler. (This gap is most likely a remnant of a board design that included video outputs for integrated graphics.)

The rest of the PI-A9RX480's port cluster looks good. The board comes with PCI brackets containing an additional Firewire port and coaxial digital S/PDIF audio input and output ports. Curiously, though, the PI-A9RX480 doesn't come with PCI brackets for any of its onboard USB headers.