Review: Sapphire Pure RS780G Hybrid CrossFire motherboard: hot or not at £60?

Personal feeling

To sum it up, the Radeon HD 3200 is the highest performance integrated graphics solution we've tested, and the competition, NVIDIA and Intel, will have to substantially improve if they're to have a chance of competing on IGP performance and feature-set.

As a personal aside, I do have to question how important IGP gaming performance really is. The HD 3200 doesn't really overcome the limitations of an IGP for gaming; it's still not powerful enough to game with the very latest DX10 titles, even at low-end settings at a decent resolution, so as long as the competition provides sufficient performance for Vista's Aero interface and media playback, the practical usage would largely be the same.

That said, available at a very reasonable price, paired with a low-cost processor, the Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G would make for a very competent general-purpose or home-theatre PC which leverages the strengths of AMD's peerless RS780G IGP chipset..

However, the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H offers performance that's very similar, if not the same; greater connectivity options with HDMI; FireWire and eSATA; seems to be more generally available and can be found costing a few pounds less.

Bottom line: the Sapphire board is based on a highly competent chipset and does well as a result, but others do the same thing, if not more, for even less money.

HEXUS Awards

Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G

HEXUS Where2Buy

Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G available for £61.15 from CCL Online.

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H available for around £56 to £57 from SCAN, MicroDirect and TekHeads.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of Sapphire's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

HEXUS related reading

HEXUS.net - HEXUS.reviews :: AMD RS780G - integrated graphics redefined! (Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H)
HEXUS.net - HEXUS.reviews :: AMD 690G chipset

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I don't understand why people would go for this hybrid crossfire (£60 mobo + £25 gfx = £85) over a cheaper board + a HD3650 (£45 mobo + £40 gfx)? Might even be able to squeeze a 8800gs into that budget as they were going for less than £50 on ebuyer…

Being able to have the performance of a HD 4800-series card on demand, with the power-draw of the integrated HD 3200 during idle and media playback would be a far greater boon than receiving around 20 per cent additional performance when pairing the chipset with a HD 3450-based card.

So can you pair the board with a 4850 and have it work in tandem? Is the 790G series going to bring that to the table?

I really like the idea of the Hybrid CrossFire motherboards. I saw the reviews of the 680G's and will definatly use them or more likely the 780G's for any media pc's or simple surfing machines for anyone that wants a new pc.

I'd love either a X3 or X4 BE with a 4850 and the onboard for 2D/movies. Fire up the 4850 for games only. Dump it in a little Shuttle Enclosure with Mirrored Raid for storage and a little SSD for OS/Games.

/me goes back to dreaming of lottery win :P (And a Puma Laptop)

The RS780G does not allow a higher end graphics card to power down at idle for ‘performance on demand’.

I believe the upcoming RS780GX may though.

& afaik Hybrid Crossfire runs both at the specs of the lower so you would in fact be better off running the 4850 with the IGP disabled than running in Hybrid Crossfire.