Sapphire PURE Innovation HDMI PI-AM2RS690MHD Motherboard

Introduction:

    Sapphire has always had a great relationship with ATI in the graphics card department, and now even a greater relationship with AMD since the merger with ATI. This allows companies like Sapphire to work closely with one company to create a better product. This product of which I speak is the Sapphire PURE Innovation HDMI PI-AM2RS690MHD Motherboard. Whew - what a mouthful. The PCB of the Sapphire PURE is white and accented with some red, blue, and black. This combination looks sharp.

      A few months back, AMD released the 690G chipset which incorporates the new Radeon X1250 graphics core. The processed image from the 690G can pass through one of three ports on the motherboard: rear panel VGA and HDMI connection or a PCI expansion card with a DVI port. Not to mention the 690G is also outfitted with the Avivo processing engine, and also has video out to a TV. With all these features on a chipset, this leads to a very good contender in the budget HTPC market.

Specifications:

Chipset

• AMD® RS690G+SB600 Chipset.

Processor

• Support for AMDTM K8 Processor in a Socket AM2 package.

• Support Hypertransport interface bus.

• Flexible motherboard design with onboard VRM, easy to upgrade with future AMDTM K8 processors.

• 0.800V to 1.55V in 25mV steps.

System Memory

• A total of four 240 pin DDRII SDRAM sockets (optional).

• DIMM sizes from 64 Mbytes to 4Gbyte.

• Supports Dual Channel 128-bit Wide Memory Interface.

• Supports 533/667/800 DDRII SDRAM memory types. System BIOS

• PnP, APM, ATAPI and Windows® 2000/XP.

• Full support of ACPI & DMI.

• Auto detects and supports LBA harddisk with capacities over 160GB.

• Easy to upgrade BIOS by end-user.

Plug and Play

• Supports Plug and Play specification 1.1.

• Plug and play for Windows® 2000, as well as Windows® XP.

• Fully steerable PCI interrupts.

Onboard VGA

• Integrated ATI PCIE X1250 graphic core.

• Supports CRT or TV Out display.

• Integrated DAC and CRT controllers.

• Full screen/full speed video playback.

• Up to 2048x1536, non-interlaced screen resolution for CRT.

• Support DVI-D port (via header) (optional)

• TV Out (optional)

• Integrated TV encoder.

• 10-bit DAC with 4-tap filter.

• PAL/NTSC TV Out with Composite and S-Video outputs (via a header).

• ATI's exclusive "Composite Dot Crawl" freeze option for PAL and NTSC to improve the picture quality.

• TV-Out power management support.

Expanded USB Support

• Includes 2 OHCI host controllers.

• Includes 1 EHCI USB2.0 Host Controller that supports all ports(Bandwidth is shared between the all ports).

• This motherboard supports USB 2.0 only on Windows® 2000(with SP4 or above) and Windows® XP (with SP1 or above) operation systems.

PCI Express Graphics Interface

• One 16-lane PCI Express graphics port, fully compliant with the PCI Express Base Specification revision 1.0a.

• A base PCI Express frequency of 2.5Gb/s only.

• PCI Express support and Enhanced Addressing Mechanism.

• PCI Express X1 Port

• Full PCI Express 1.0a compliant.

• One virtual channel support for full isochronous data transfers.

• Support for full 2.5Gb/s bandwidth in each direction per X1 lane.

Onboard I/O

• One onboard PCI fast IDE ports supporting up to 2 ATA, ATA2 , UltraATA33/66/100/133 IDE HDDs, CD-ROMs, ZIP drives and LS-120 drives as boot drive.

• One ECP/EPP parallel port.

• One 16550 Compatible UART serial port (via a header).

• One floppy port which supports two FDD of 1.44MB, 2.88MB capacity.

• Ten USB ports (six ports via three headers).

• PS/2 keyboard support.

• PS/2 mouse support.

• One front panel sound connector.

• Infrared (IrDA) support via a header.

Onboard Realtek RTL8100C/RTL8110S PCI LAN (optional)

• Provides 32-bit performance, PCI bus master capability.

• Full compliance with IEEE 802.3u 100 Base-T specifications and IEEE 802.3X Full Duplex Flow Control.

• Supports 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s (only for RTL8110S)operation.

• Supports Wake-On-LAN function and remote wake-up.

• Supports ACPI, PCI Power management and PCI VPD.

Onboard HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface)

• Integrated 30-bit TMDS HDMI interface.

• Support EIA-861B uncompressed digital video modes.

• HDMI accepts 50Hz video formats, and that supports HDTV capability.

• Supports 1280x720p@59.94/60Hz.

Power Management

• Supports SMM, APM and ACPI.

• Break switch for instant suspend/resume on system operations.

• Energy star "Green PC" compliant.

• Hardware monitoring circuit provides voltage, fan speed, etc. monitoring (optional).

• External Modem Ring-in Wake-up support.

• Supports suspend-to-RAM (STR) (optional).(Note: Make sure that the current of your 5VSB power supply is more than 1.5A. Please use a 300 watt power supply or greater.)

Onboard IEEE1394 (optional)

• Compliant with 1394 OHCI specifications v1.0 and v1.1.

• Integrated 400Mbit 2 port PHY.

Onboard HDA Sound

• Integrated HDA controller with HDA codec.

• Support 16/20/24 bit PCM format for 7.1 sound play back.

• Support SPDIF-IN/OUT .

• Windows® 2000/XP ready.

Onboard Serial ATAII Host Controller (optional)

• Independent DMA operation on four ports.

• Data transfer rates of 300Mb/s.

• RAID feature support .

Expansion slots

• 1 PCI Express X16 slot.

• 1 PCI Express X1 slot.

• 2 PCI slots, - ver. 2.2 compliant (optional).