Sapphire PURE Innovation HDMI (PI-AM2RS690MHD)

Sapphire really have the right idea with their packaging, firstly we have a list of supported CPU’s (Sempron, A64, FX, X2) and chipset used. This is backed up by a HDMI logo and various other technical logos which inform people browsing of the board’s features such as GBLan, HD 8ch Audio and Raid 0/1. More importantly the front flips open to review a window through which the motherboard can be seen in full detail.

Included in the bundle are the usual array of drivers and manuals, however Sapphire also add a few freebies in the form of Stompsoft tools such as PCBackup. There are also a good selection of cables and those with cases which have PCI brackets for ATX motherboards will find that they have more than enough connectors to fill the free slots. The more notable connectors are the audio and video outs, the most interesting one being a small PCIe card which sits in the 16x slot and provides DVI out for those who require it and don’t have a stand alone graphics card.

Whereas the MSI board on the previous page was reasonably feature full with the components relatively spaced out, the Sapphire Pure Innovation is absolutely jam packed with features and components. One down side of the board is the placement of the 1x Slot below the 16x slot however this really is our only complaint and every other aspect is well thought out. The drive connectors are all very close to the edge of the board meaning that we don’t have cables in the way of access to slots or jumpers, additionally it makes cable routing easier resulting in a tidier case with better airflow. There are also four memory slots rather than two as seen on most Micro-ATX boards. This increases the maximum memory support up to 8 GB of DDR2-800 in dual channel mode.

Connectivity options on the Sapphire board are very similar to that of the MSI, including the onboard HDMI (also via an 80nm X700/X1250 based with 4 pixel pipelines and 2 vertex shaders), with the only difference in connectivity between the K9AGM2 and this being the one less built in Firewire port. This is of course countered by the numerous add in brackets provided by Sapphire.

An American Megatrends BIOS is also used here and we have the standard main menu layout. More notable configuration options are the ability to change the memory timings and IGP shared memory size. CPU (1.45v), chipset and Memory voltage (up to 2.1v) are also configurable. For the CPU overclockers out there we have a plenty of settings which allow us to overclock HTT and CPU multiplier on unlocked CPU’s. There is a crazy amount of multipliers available in the options which go as high as 25x and on HTT the choices run from 200 to 440 MHz.