Cooling

It seems ATI's chipsets are not generating too much heat. That's why a passive solution works fine, even when heavily overclocked. Noise aware PC users will sure love that.
I tried if an active fan would help overclocking, but this is not the case.


Special consideration has been given to keep 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 as long as you use common sense.

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.


Most monitoring applications support the ITE 8712F monitoring chip, which almost every motherboard manufacturer uses at the moment.


ATI's chipset does not have native support for Ethernet, so one PCI-Express lane is used to implement Gigabit Ethernet via this Marvell 88E805 network chip.


ATI motherboards have to use special clock generators in their designs. Out of the five possible chips the ICS951446 is the most popular with enthusiast motherboards, since it offers options like wide clock range and fixed PCI/PCI-E clocks, even when overclocked.


The Realtec ALC880 sound chip supports Intel's High-Definition Audio standard and offers quite good sound quality as testing later shows.


A SiI3132 Serial ATA chip from Silicon Image provides two 300 MB/s SATA-II ports.


On the board you will find two IEEE1394 ports which are connected to this VIA VT6307 IEEE1394 controller. One port is on the back panel, the other one as header on the board, where you connect the external bracket to.