Cooling

Sapphire's PI-A9RX480 does not use any active cooling at all, which makes this a very quiet board during operation.


Special consideration has been given to keeping the MOSFET area around the CPU socket cool. A massive heatsink is attached to the transistors. The heatsink is 35x35mm, which means it will be a bit tricky to get a 40mm fan attached to it.

I laid a 40mm fan on top of the heatsink and marked the heatsink area red in following picture.

As you see, the fan is overlapping, making the screws hard to get in, but it is possible.


You want to use a bigger fan or waterblock? No problem, in addition to the two mounting holes of the heatsink, there are five extra holes here, that could be used to build you own mounting construction.


The heatsink is easy to get off. Sapphire doesn't use glue, but a sticky thermal pad. If you twist the heatsink while pulling it up, it goes off much easier. I see very little risk of accidentally pulling a MOSFET.

Chips

Sapphire uses only high-quality components on the motherboard, for example the capacitors are all japanese-built. Another point to note, is that special MOSFETs are used which increase power stability as well as price.


Hardware monitoring is provided by ITE's 8712F. This is pretty much one of the most common monitoring chips right now, so getting software support for it should be easy.


For networking, Sapphire chose a Marvell 88E805 10/100/1000 LAN controller which is connected via the PCI-Express bus, since ATI does not include a way to connect an ethernet chip directly to the chipset.


The Realtek ALC880 Audio Chip is responsible for sound. It features 7.1 Audio and SPDIF.


Silicon Image's SiI3132 provides two additional SATA-II ports, in addition to the ports of the ATI chipset. So you have a total of six ports, plus the two IDE channels.


Two IEEE1394 ports are implemented by the VIA VT6307 IEEE1394 controller.