Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast

Gaming Performance

If you keep in mind that the orange bar represents the same NVIDIA 6800 Ultra used to test the other boards in this review, you can clearly see that the Sapphire ATI is at or near the top in most game tests. The Sapphire ATI chipset performs at least as fast as the best of nForce4 chipset boards. This is a significant accomplishment for ATI, since there are no glaring performance weaknesses that would tilt the buying decision to a competitor's board.

You can also see that the Sapphire ATI performs very well when driving an NVIDIA 7800GTX video card. You may be surprised to see such a relatively small advantage for the 7800GTX in many of our gaming benchmarks, but that is a result of screen resolution. We run all benchmarks at 1280x1024, which is the highest resolution available on the most used 19" and smaller flat panels. The 7800GTX pulls away only when all the eye candy is turned on or at even higher resolutions. The point of this is that unless you have a 20" or larger LCD (or you're happy with a high-res CRT), the 7800GTX may be a wasted expense that will bring you little additional performance for what the added cost.