May 9, 2008
Sean "Obsidian" Potter
Colin "Rhettigan" Dean
Sapphire
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Sapphire 780G Motherboard and Hybrid CrossFire
Installation
Installation was trivial for the PI-AM2RS780G. I was able to snap the I/O shield in to our case, the Thermaltake M9. Following that, I installed the motherboard, Phenom 9500 provided by AMD, and OCZ's 2GB kit of DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC CrossFire Certified Edition RAM.
I also tried to install a CPU Cooler from CoolJag, but the PI-AM2RS780G north bridge was much too close to the heatsink clips.
I'll be using both Windows and Linux. Let's look at the final system specifications before I move in to the benchmarks. Also note that I've opted to test this system against a similarly-equipped ECS GeForce 6150 motherboard.
| Processor | AMD Phenom 9500 | AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ |
| Motherboard | Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G 780G | ECS GeForce 6150/nForce 430 |
| RAM | 2GB DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC CrossFire Certified | 2GB DDR2 PC2-8500 WinTel |
| Video Card | RS780 / Radeon HD3450 / CrossFire | Integrated GeForce 6150 |
| Chassis | Thermaltake M9 | |
| CPU Cooling | Xigmatek HDT-S1283 | |
| Hard Drive | Excelstor 250GB SATA2 | |
| Power Supply | StarTech.com WattSmart 750W Power Supply | |
| Display | 1280x1024 | |
Despite being powered by a slower processor, we still feel any benchmarks will still give good indication of any advantages or (particularly) disadvantages the 780G board has.
