Sapphire A4-A985 (Ati A4) Motherboard Review
Performance and conclusions
As you can see, the section to do with overclocking is missing. That's right - Sapphire A4-A985 has no functions like these at all. Or, more precisely, the PCB design provides for an installation of the dip-switch block SW1 (near the processor socket) with which the user is able varying the processor voltage between 1.1V and 1.85V. Unfortunately, no such block is there on this board.
As for stability, Sapphire A4-A985 has nothing to complain about. The power converter is built on the 2-channel scheme and has nine 3300 mkF capacitors.
It's interesting to note that the transistors are equipped with radiators, which in turn tells of increased loads at the power converter.
A couple of words on the performance. In our testing system we used the following hardware:
| Test hardware |
| Processor |
Processor Intel Pentium 4 2.4B (Northwood) |
| Video card: |
Ti4200(315/600) based on the NVidia GeForce4 64Mb chip
nVidia Detonator v40.72 |
| Sound card |
Creative Live 5.1 |
| HDD |
IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb |
| Memory |
256 MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM manufactured by Kingston |
| Case |
Inwin506 with PowerMan 300W power supply unit |
| OS |
Windows XP |
Prior to moving on to the bechmarking, let me remind you that the i845GE platform has a certain advantage - the memory runs at 166 MHz (DDR333) versus 133 MHz (DDR266) in ATI A4. On the other hand, the ATI chipset features a perfect graphics core. Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.
In the synthetic benchmarks, Intel utterly defeats this ATI's novelty.
Now on to the gaming benchmarks.
The performance in Id Quake3 is direct dependence on the memory bus bandwidth. So, it's no wonder that the board built on the Intel chipset takes a lead both at using an external video card and operating with the integrated graphics core.
But at Serious Sam, the memory bandwidth has a much less effect on the result. Anyway, the board on Intel chipset provides a better performance.
The same story is observed with the Comanche game as well as 3D Mark 2001. The only peculiarity is that with the ATI A4 chipset the game started fine with the integrated graphics core (although played slowly :). But with the Intel 845GE board the game issued a warning requesting T&L support.
At any rate, both these platforms are not meant for gaming. Their purpose is to run 2D office applications (Excel, Word etc. ) at which the performance of both systems is about the same.
Resume: since the Sapphire A4-A985 is aimed at assembling office/budget systems, it is unjust to impart them with the requirements which matter to the home user. What matters is the board runs stably and the integrated video provides acceptable 2D quality and speed.
Finally, the price of the board is about $70-75, which in my view is a bit too high for a board without support for USB 2.0 and integrated LAN.
Conclusion
Pros:
- Good stability;
- Good 2D quality.
Cons:
- No support for USB 2.0;
- Overstated price.
The board's specific features:
- Complete lack of overclocking options;
- Scarce package bundle.
Read more on budget-class motherboards
 Jetway PEA : i845PE
Intel D845GEBV2 : i845GE
A roundup of 845PE/GE based motherboards
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