Sapphire readying three new motherboards, AM3+ launched

[siopao1984]

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When it comes to its range of motherboard products, Sapphire has been quite slow to bring new products to market and today the company finally announced its AM3+ motherboard, the Pure Black 990FX. However, we have details of three additional motherboards alongside with pictures, all of which we're expecting should arrive before the end of the year from Sapphire.

The Pure Black 990FX may be late, but at least is has some competitive features such as six x16 PCI Express slot – in a dual x16 or four x8 configuration with two x4 slots – and nine internal SATA 6Gbps ports. Other features include two front USB 3.0 ports – bracket included – a Molex connector for extra power to the PCI Express slots, a POST80 debug LED, manually selectable BIOS and a power and reset button.

Around the back the board has a PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Bluetooth 2.1 dongle, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports via Marvell chips and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out. The downside is that the board is quite expensive at around €160 (S$275/US$210) which makes it fairly uncompetitive unless you really want a board with the specific slot layout on offer here.

So what about the other three models? Well, continuing on the AMD theme we have the Pure White A55M which unlike what the name suggests is another black and blue motherboard (no-one's beaten it up as far as we're aware). This is set to be Sapphire's budget FM1 motherboard, but at least Sapphire hasn't skimped on all the features here. The board is a mATX model and it has a single x16 PCI Express slot, two x1 PCI Express slots and a PCI slot. Add six SATA 3Gbps ports, dual BIOS, power and reset buttons and a feature Sapphire calls Memory Free which appears to be some kind of push button memory configuration solution and things aren't looking too bad.

Around the back we find a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, a pair of USB 3.0 ports via an ASMedia host controller, a Gigabit Ethernet port, three audio jacks for 5.1-channel audio, a D-Sub, DVI and HDMI port. Note that the DVI and HDMI ports on this board can most likely not be used at the same time. One thing that did catch our attention was a pin-header labelled FUSB3 which appears to be for front USB 3.0 ports, but it doesn't look like the standard USB 3.0 pin-headers, nor does there appear to be a second USB 3.0 host controller on the board. That said, the silk screening on the board reads PW-A8A75M so it's possible that Sapphire is/was planning an AMD A75 chipset version of this board and it's possible that some things will change before launch.

Read more: Sapphire readying three new motherboards, AM3+ launched by VR-Zone.com

[siopao1984]

Moving on to the Sapphire's new motherboards for Intel processors we have yet another budget model, although this time around a full-size ATX model in the shape of the Pure Platinum H61P. There we're looking at a single x16 PCI Express slot, two x1 PCI Express slots and three PCI slots with the help of an ASMedia bridge chip. Sapphire has also added a pair of extra SATA ports of the 6Gbps kind, again by the help of what appears to be a controller from ASMedia.



You do of course also get the four SATA 3Gbps ports from the Intel chipset. This board only has a pair of DIMMs due to the choice of chipset, although Sapphire appears to have included a pair of BIOS chips, as well as power and reset buttons even on what should be a fairly basic board. Around the back we have a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio, a D-Sub, DVI and HDMI port. Nothing all too special, but a decent enough board if you're on a budget.



We did of course, as you do, save the best to the last, namely the Pure Black X79. We've already seen this board in quite some detail just over a month ago, but we now have high-resolution pictures of the 1.0 revision. What have changed you ask? Not much as far as we can tell and sadly the fan cooled heatsink is still in place. Maybe the lack of changes is a good thing and although admittedly we were wrong when we expected this to be part of the first batch of X79 motherboards, there most likely was a reason as to why it didn't launch alongside everyone else's X79 boards. For detailed information on the Pure Black X79, check out our earlier coverage.