Don't you love healthy competition? Competition has given us some of out greatest technological advances. For example, the competition between Russia and America during the Cold War caused us to race to the moon. The competition between pharmaceutical companies have brought us some of our most beneficial medicine. The competition between Ali and Foreman gave us the Foreman Grills. Yes, an open and free market has been good to us. A little closer to our hearts has been the competition between Intel and AMD; I still remember when the AMD CPU was considered to be in the same class that the Crusoe was. Intel sat on their laurels as AMD got their crap together and slowly started to improve their product while improving their market share. It has been only recently that Intel woke up and realized that they had better start innovating again in order to keep their market lead. The winner so far? You and I, Joe Consumer, who reap the benefits of better quality and performance at lower costs from both companies..

We've been just as fortunate in the NVIDIA vs ATI graphics card contest. It was NVIDIA who first enjoyed market share and kind of sat on their heels while ATI innovated and eventually produced a card that could trounce the best that NVIDIA had to offer. Of course, NVIDIA got off their collective ass and came out with another that could beat ATI, and so on and so on... All the while we get better technology at lower prices. NVIDIA decided to branch out into the motherboard market and because of that, we enthusiasts get to play with our nForce4 motherboards which have proven to be exceptional. The nForce4 board has made NVIDIA a lot of money so far, but in the warped time of computing, it is actually starting to get a little long in the tooth. ATI believes they see a chink in NVIDIA's armor and developed their own chipset to compete with the NVIDIA NF4; they developed the Radeon Express 200P chipset and hope to leave 4 Red finger marks on the cheek of NVIDIA.

One of the first out of the gate with their own ATI 200P solution is Sapphire Technology. Sapphire has become one of my favorite "just below the horizon" companies when it comes to new gear. They take a product, review the capabilities, and then throw their own little twist on it. Take for example the Sapphire X800 GTO2 Limited Edition graphics card. Do they deviate from the ATI blueprint? Yeah, by a bit; they did a little deviation with the Sapphire Pure Innovation motherboard by taking the standard design, tweaked it, and made it their own.

Package

I'll tell you, my heart started to sink when I arrived home to find the FedEx box imbedded in my front door. I really need to start giving Christmas cards to the guys who make deliveries to my house. I was relieved when I pried the contents out of the FedEx box and saw that it had been protected and there was no damage to the actual motherboard box at all.

The box is pretty flashy since it is covered in reflective Silver and has a Kung-Fu robot on the front. The corner peek at the board itself gives a tantalizing hint of what lies beneath. The front of the box opens to allow a full window view of the Sapphire Pure Innovation board.

Tell me, isn't that one of the purdiest boards you've seen seen since the Soyo Dragon KT400 Platinum? I "borrowed" the full board pics from Sapphire since the top is pretty reflective and honestly, their shot looks better than any that I took of the full top. I think I would have to cut a window in the motherboard tray and right side of the case just to show off the nice Sapphire logo on the bottom of the board. Some things I would like you to notice right now, look at how crowded the socket area is and how close to the top of the board the socket is located. I'll be mentioning these items later on. Also notice that all cooling on the board is passive, although it is what I would call massive passive. The board is 6 layered to accommodate all the traces for the many features and add-on chips mounted on it.

Included with the Sapphire motherboard is a 1394 PCI rear panel adapter with two ports, a SPDIF-in/out PCI rear panel adapter, a single PATA cable, a floppy cable, a single SATA cable, 3 CD's, an I/O cover, and the manual. Look at the I/O cover, notice anything unusual? The 3 CD's are nothing to get excited about; 1 CD contains the drivers, one contains some cheap backup, virus, and privacy software that I would never install on any computer I own, and the third is a CD of game demos. Notice that I did not mention a rear panel adapter for the USB. Pretty slim pickin's here.

The manual was refreshing though. It is very detailed, well written, and contains good graphics to show you where and what everything is. The best feature of this manual is something that other manufacturers have stopped including in theirs, a walk-through of the BIOS menu options. As our BIOS' become more advanced and we gain more control over the base functions of our PC's, there are more and more options added into the BIOS that are not exactly self-evident as to what they do. This manual explains quite a few features, but it will not, for example, tell you if you what your RAM Bypass Max setting should be or whether or not to enable the DQS Hysteresis.