Latest Boards Products (Sapphire - PI-AM2RS780G review)

At first glance, Sapphire's PI-AM2RS780G looks like the perfect board to base an HTPC (Home Theatre PC) around. But digging a little deeper reveals that it is something of a missed opportunity, which is a real shame. As it is, it would make the ideal basis for a quiet, non-gaming (if you use the integrated graphics) everyday PC.

The reason for the disappointment is that AMD's latest 780G chipset, on which the board is based, can support VGA, DVI, HDMI and Display Port outputs. Unfortunately Sapphire chose to go with the VGA and DVI options and didn't include the HDMI port, which would have made this board a real contender for the home-built HTPC.

As the board uses the 780G chipset you get fairly decent integrated graphics powered by the HD3200 core in the Northbridge, which also can relieve the burden of the CPU when it comes to decoding high-definition content via the UVD (Unified Video Decoder) which supports both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The HD3200 has a clock speed of 500MHz and supports DirectX 10.

t can use up to 512MB of the system memory and also supports Hybrid Graphics; add in a dedicated card (currently only HD2400 and HD3400 series cards are supported, and then only in Vista) and you can set up Crossfire using both the integrated core and the discrete card. This also works in a power-saving mode, so when the graphical demand is low it only uses the integrated core, but when you switch to something more demanding the technology dynamically uses both.

The board is well laid out despite its MicroATX format, even down to things like the locking latches on the four DIMM slots not being blocked by a card in the single 16x PCI-E slot. The slots support 800MHz DDR2 memory up to a maximum of 8GB.

The only other slots for extra cards are two PCI slots, but with integrated eight-channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet, that should be plenty.

Both the Northbridge and the SB700 Southbridge are passively cooled, as are the voltage regulators. Six SATA 3.0GBps ports are provided and, thanks to the SB700 chipset, drives can be built into RAID 0, 1 or 10 arrays.

Tucked away under the memory slots is an LED display for showing the POST codes during start-up: very useful should things go awry... or it would be if Sapphire had put a list of the codes and their meanings in the manual.