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| Sapphire Pure Crossfire AM2RD580 SLI under CrossFire | |
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(Review by MS, October 8, 2007) |
SB600 and Integrated Peripherals
ATI's new SouthBridge dubbed SB600 is the long-awaited replacement for the SB450 with its known weaknesses. The new SouthBridge integrates support for 10 USB2.0 ports along with the support for legacy ports like floppy disk drives, serial ports and parallel/printerports through the LPC bus using the IT8712F controller as interface. In addition, the SB600 supports high-definition audio (with up to 192kHz sample rate and up to 32-bit per sample) and support for HD DVD and Blu-Ray HD audio. In terms of hard disk drive support, the SB600 supports a single parallel ATA channel for two devices and four SATA 3.0 channels with full backward compatibility with SATA 1.5 drives. Supported RAID levels over all four ports are 0, 1, 10 (requires four drives).
More SATA
In addition to the four SATA 2.5 (3.0 Gb/sec) channels integrated into the SB600, Sapphire has added two SiI 3132 single lane PCIe two port SATA 2.5 host controllers.
A single Parallel ATA port suffices for two optical drives; two SiI 3132 SATA 2.5 controllers wtih two ports each plug directly into the PCIe backbone.
Azalia Audio
Sapphire uses the Realtek ALC882D audio CODEC which is compliant with Intel's high-definition audio standard and which is an updated version of the older ALC882 CODEC with added-in support for Dolby noise suppression. In terms of actual audio quality, the onboard audio of the Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 is the best on-board audio solution we have come across so far. No matter what we tried, there was no interference of hard disk actions or mouse movements/clicks or any other system components with the audio - things that are very common on other systems, the directional audio worked fine in all games tested and in DVD playback and the actual "audio quality" from a subjective standard is about as good as it gets without migrating to a high-end sound card.
Realtek's ALC882D "Dolby" enabled audio CODEC and the front panel audio header. I/O connector block with analog audio, USB, Gigabit Ethernet and Firewire ports in addition to the legacy PS/2 connectors.
Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394 Firewire
Ethernet Gigabit connectivity is supported by the Marvell Yukon chipset-based 88E8052 controller. In contrast to most nForce-based motherboards, the PC-AM2RD50 only features a single Ethernet port which suffices for most users anyway. IEEE1394a (400 Mbs) is enabled through VIA's VT6307 firewire controller with support for two channels. The first channel is ported through the I/O connector block, whereas the second channel can be enabled through the Firewire bracket and the header in the lower left corner of the motherbard.
ITE LPC controller, Marvell Gigabit Ethernet PhyLayer and VIA VT6307 IEEE1394a controller.
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