Here's a motherboard that deserves to be shown off in a case with a transparent side panel. Why? Because the Pure CrossFire 3200 Advantage (also known as the PC-AM2RD580) is built on a white PCB with contrasting red route tracing.

Not only that, but it comes - as you might have gathered from the name - with CrossFire support. Yet compared to other motherboards in this price range, the expansion possibilities are somewhat limited. In fact, if you need more features and expansion you might want to go for the PC-AM2RD580's sibling, the PC-AM2RD580 Advantage.

At the heart of the Pure CrossFire 3200 lies an AMD AM2 socket supporting all AMD processors from the lowly Sempron up through Athlon64 to the Athlon64 X2 and 64 FX product lines. Supporting the AM2 socket is an ATI - or rather AMD - RD580 (Xpress 3200) chipset which, amongst other things, provides 32 of the 40 available PCI-E lanes purely dedicated for the graphics, meaning you can run CrossFire at full x16 speed.

The other half of the chipset combination is ATI's SB600 Southbridge. To help reduce noise both of these chipsets are passively cooled. Four memory slots are provided, supporting up to 16GB of 800/667/533MHz DDR2 memory.

There are some niggly points with this board, though, and they concern the positioning of the bottom PCI-E x16 slot. Because both x16 slots are spread so far apart there is only room for one PCI slot. If you use a two-slot cooling graphics card such as an X1950XTX in your CrossFire setup, then this lone PCI slot is obscured, making it impossible to use a PCI card if you have a mega CrossFire setup.

Also, the securing tabs on the PCI-E slots themselves are all but impossible to get at once you've installed a two-slot cooled card. Although Sapphire isn't the only manufacturer guilty of this, it's an annoying and unnecessary inconvenience.

Eight SATA II ports are supplied, four controlled by the SB600 Southbridge and four by a pair of Silicon Image Sil3132 IC chips. The four controlled by the Southbridge are nicely snuggled next to the chipset while the other four are split into two pairs along the bottom of the board.

Onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC882D chip which supports 8-channel audio and comes with Dolby noise suppression. Most motherboards in this price bracket have dual Gigabit support but the PC-AM2RD580 makes do with just a single Gigabit Ethernet port: most people only use one anyway. Another reason for putting this board in a transparent case is that the Pure CrossFire 3200 has a good sprinkling of red LEDs which flicker when data is transferred from various ports.

The BIOS provides a good deal of overclocking opportunities, including voltage adjustments for the CPU, memory, HyperTransport, both North and South bridges and PCI-E. You can also tinker with the frequency for the CPU, memory and PCI-E. Last but not least, all the memory timings can be altered. To its credit Sapphire does try to explain what all this means in the fairly comprehensive manual: its not all there, by any means, but at least there's a good stab at it.

A fast and stable motherboard, if a little expensive, especially when you consider the features some of its competitors have. It also suffers from some annoying design ideas, namely the second 16x PCI-E slot and the locking latches for the graphics slots.