Sound Levels

As mentioned above, the board uses all passive cooling, so the total sound level is 0 dBA.
There were no squeaking noises or similar, even under heavy load.

Overclocking

In order to find out the overclocking potential of the Sapphire PI-A9RX480, we put a Dangerden TDX waterblock on our CPU and set the multiplier to 4x with a memory divider of 2:1. This is to make sure that neither the CPU nor the memory are limiting our overclock here.

A maximum FSB of 355 MHz is very good. This should be good enough for most people. You have to consider that this was with all passive cooling on the chipset (which got blazing hot, around 90°C).
If you put active cooling on the chip, raise the chipset voltage some more and get a lucky board, 400 MHz might be possible.



For a more real-world overclocking score we left the multiplier at 9x and slowly increased the FSB. Since our memory can not run that fast, we had to drop the memory ratio to 2:3 which means the memory was running at DDR400 while the CPU ran at 2700 MHz. The board was no limiting factor here at any time. I always thought the CPU's limit was 2700 MHz, but apparently it can go a bit faster on the Sapphire PI-A9RX480. We reached an impressive, completetly stable 2736 real MHz with our 1800 MHz AMD64 CPU. It was quite warm in the room, so low water temperatures were not the reason for the higher overclock.