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

General Performance

It should come as no surprise that high performance video has little impact on Winstone performance. Whether the top ATI card, the comparable NVIDIA 6800 Ultra, or the latest NVIDIA 7800GTX, Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation 2004 results are pretty much the same at the same CPU speed. The lone exception is the 1.5 to 2 point boost given to Business Winstone 2004 by NVIDIA video cards. We have commented on this before, but still cannot explain why NVIDIA cards perform better in Business Winstone. This is most clearly demonstrated when you compare performance of the ATI X850XT PE at 28 to the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra and 7800GTX at about 2 points higher.

PCMark 2004 appears to slightly favor ATI video cards in their performance score, while the newest PCMark 2005 seems to be the opposite - providing better results for the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra with the 7800GTX with a substantial lead in the PCMark 2005 score.

There is little to distinguish or detract from the Sapphire ATI in General Performance benchmarks. The Sapphire board is competitive with the best Socket 939 Athlon 64 boards that we have tested.