Sapphire goes for the gold

Below you can find a picture of Sapphire’s Radeon Xpress 200 based mainboard that was showcased earlier during CeBit. During TXG (Texas Gaming Festival) proffessional overclockers used ATI’s new mainboard chipset for Athlon 64, which really proves the integrity of the board.
How you then choose to use the board is what makes the difference.

Sapphire has in conjunction with the overclockingconvention at TXG, which we will publish an article on later on, bet it all on overclocking. Sapphire Group, which the board is called, is very similar to DFI’s new LanParty-series which gives the user a wide series of settings to play with when overlocking.
The BIOS-settings for Sapphire Group seems to cover the most, especially with settings for the processor/memory-voltate that will put most other boards to shame.

Except some really nice settings the board has a layout really screams “overclocking friendly”. Among others you will find support for passiv or active cooling of the four-phase power supply. With similar attachments for the chipset cooler you can attach a cooler over the MOSFETs to keep these stressed components’ temperature low.

Appearantly the watercooling manufaturer Danger Den will launch a kit especially for this board and over at XtremeSystems they’ve managed to get a hold of some pictures with the kit installed.
Sapphire Group alone is a very sexy mainboard, but with blocks in place it’s almost to much.

NVIDIA will have to face facts and look out because the enthusiast market just got a new baby to play with and the Sapphire Group vs. DFI LanParty duel will be highly enticipated.

Source: XtremeSystems