As one of ATI's major OEM partners, Sapphire is finally moving into the motherboard scene and, naturally, Sapphire is also amongst the first to come out with a Crossfire edition motherboard based on the ATI Halibut design. On paper, the board looks great, the quality of components is stellar, and the color scheme of the board - along with an excellent layout - make the Pure Crossfire (PC-A9RD480) look like a dream come true. Behind the surface, though, there are still some issues, some relating to drivers, some relating to compatibility, and last not least, maybe some issues with the specific board we had for testing. After several weeks of looking at about every possible angle of the Pure Crossfire, we weeded out a bunch of bugs, found some mis-documentations and some workarounds for quite a few problems.

Are we happy now? To be true, there is no way of answering that question in a single paragraph, in fact, we have some 18 pages, for your reading pleasure...