Review: Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT

Our first taste of AMD's new Trinity platform came in the shape of the Asus F2A85-V Pro. Sapphire must hope we're sticking to the playground rule of metrics though, making this second one the best, and whatever ASRock board is sitting in the wings the one with the hairy chest.

There are the standard four DIMM slots supporting DDR3 up to 1,600MHz at standard settings and faster speeds via overclocking, five PCIe slots of varying speeds, four display outputs, seven SATA 6Gbps ports, a smattering of USB 3.0 ports and a dual BIOS setup, which is accessible via a two-way switch on the board.

Also sitting between the two PCIe 2.0 slots is a mini PCIe slot, which can be used to house an mSATA SSD drive. However, while it's fine with a single graphics card in place, with a second card in the lower slot it may be a bit tight.

The Trinity platform supports up to four HD displays, so it's no surprise to find all four port types on the rear I/O panel. Triple view is supported by using the VGA and DVI ports with either HDMI or DisplayPort.

There's also that pair of PCIe 2.0 slots. The primary slot runs at full x16 speed with a single card installed; however dropping a second card into the other slot in a CrossFire setup drops the speed of both slots down to x8 speed.

You also get a pair of x1 PCIe ports, which sit between the two larger slots, while an x4 slot sits above them. And if you have any old PCI cards to use, the board also comes with a pair of standard PCI slots.

Under a modest passive heatsink are the components for the 6+2 power design. The heatsink is low enough in profile that it shouldn't get in the way of most third-party CPU coolers. The A85XT (Hudson-D4 FCH) chipset is also passively cooled, with a modestly sized heatsink.

On the bottom edge of the board are the CMOS reset, reset and power buttons. On the Pure Platinum A85XT these are joined by the two-way switch for the dual BIOS.

We used a retail boxed version of AMD's latest A10-5800K CPU with the standard cooler. It stood up to the challenge, but if you want to push the A10-5800K as far as it will go, a third-party cooler is a must.

Memory bandwidth performance
SiSoft Sandra: Gigabytes per second: Higher is better
Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT: 12.9
Asus F2A85-V Pro with A10 5800K: 10.5
Asus Sabertooth Z77 with i3-3225: 17

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index: Higher is better
Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT: 3.21
Asus F2A85-V Pro with A10 5800K: 3.16
Asus Sabertooth Z77 with i3-3225: 3.28

Encoding performance
X264 3.0 HD: Frames per second: Higher is better
Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT: 20
Asus F2A85-V Pro with A10 5800K: 21
Asus Sabertooth Z77 with i3-3225: 19

Performance-wise, the Sapphire board keeps close company with the Asus. In fact it delivers a little extra in the standard CPU tests, and seems to have an edge in the memory bandwidth test.

The main comparison with an IvB i3-3225, using its top-end HD 4000 graphics, works out pretty favourably for AMD. The bandwidth of the high-end Asus Sabertooth is huge, but doesn't help push the i3 ahead of the quad-core Piledriver APU in the CPU tests.

Compared with the pricier Asus board, the £100 price tag makes more sense. Trinity won't be used as the base for a high-end rig, so such feature-packed motherboards aren't vital, but having a solid board like this Sapphire mobo will help get the most out of your APU chip.

View the original article here

Review: Sapphire Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz

Did you buy shares in Apple in the 90s, which you've been holding onto? Did you manage to patent the spork, or invent a social media node that allows people to present their aspirational lifestyles in 140 characters or less?

We presume you've ticked off at least one of those, because this is the sharp end of the consumer GPU market, where prices are steep enough to make grown men weep.

Sapphire's version of the HD 7970 aims to push AMD's Graphics Core Next hardware to its very limits by boosting the core and memory clocks, and managing the excess heat with its top-of-the-line air cooling. It's not unreasonably pricier than the vanilla model, but does this Sapphire monster push the HD 7970 GHz Edition hard enough?

Like EVGA's Signature 2, its close competitor using Nvidia tech, the Vapor-X makes good on AMD's advancements in efficiency. The card powers itself up and down according to its workload, so boosting its clock values at full strain doesn't keep the fan whirring away or give you any heat-management nightmares.

Under load, the core clock boosts up by 200MHz, and when it's not in use, the factory values kick back in. When your machine's in standby the Vapor-X will power down to a negligible power usage and fan speed.

When considering efficiency, it looks like a dead, er, heat between EVGA and Sapphire's candidates for luxury GPU supremacy.

In gaming performance, Sapphire uses the GHz Edition's performance advantage over the GTX 680 to stretch its legs even further. We squeezed eight games through each card, each more unfeasibly demanding than a hungry toddler, and the Vapor-X was the clear winner.

It doesn't dominate across the board - there are moments at resolutions above 1080p in which EVGA's card prevails - but factoring in the effect drivers can have on each game, the Vapor-X's results offer about as much reassurance as possible that your - gulp - £400 is being well spent. It can even play Metro 2033 at max details at a vaguely playable 36fps at 1080p.

Realistically, the EVGA Signature 2's results were generally so close that you'd never notice a performance difference with the naked eye, but here in GPU fantasy land that isn't really the point. If you buy either card, you're likely to spend just as much time benchmarking and overclocking it as you do marvelling at its prowess.

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Shogun 2: FPS: Higher is better
HD 7970 GHZ VAPOR-X: 86
GTX 680 SUPERCLOCKED: 85

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Batman: AC: FPS: Higher is better
HD 7970 GHZ VAPOR-X: 66
GTX 680 SUPERCLOCKED: 66

DirectX 11 gaming performance
DiRT Showdown: FPS: Higher is better
HD 7970 GHZ VAPOR-X: 40
GTX 680 SUPERCLOCKED: 25

If you have the cojones to push the card even further than Sapphire considers safe, its Vapor-X cooler will allow a modicum of further tampering. In fact the air coolers on both cards are exemplary in their low volume and high heat dispersal.

Sapphire's Trixxx software isn't as user-friendly as EVGA's Precision suite, but both allow tinkering with clock settings and boost ratios.

All told, this is a blinder of a card. It's not hugely relevant to most of us, but for just a little extra cash than AMD's fantastic reference GHz Edition, it pushes the HD 7970 architecture hard enough to impress enthusiasts. Fingers crossed for a price drop in the near future.

View the original article here