Sapphire launches its second AMD A75 motherboard

[siopao1984]

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Sapphire launches its second AMD A75 motherboard by VR-Zone.com

It's easy to forget that Sapphire makes motherboards, as the company isn't exactly making a lot of noise about its motherboard products. The company has sneaked out yet another new model and this time we're looking at its second AMD A75 motherboard, the Pure Platinum A75P. This is a lower-end version to the Pure Platinum A75, although it does seem to have a couple of advantages over its higher-end sibling.

It's all a bit of a head scratcher, as the Pure Platinum A75P appears to have more power phases, but it might just be using a different PWM layout, it has more PCI Express x1 slots, it has a second x16 PCI Express slot and it's got six SATA ports So ok, the x16 slot still only gets four lanes from the chipset and the additional x1 PCI Express slot is most likely going to be blocked by the graphics card if one is installed, but these are still features we'd expected to see on the high-end model, rather than the mid-range one.



Plenty of things are missing though, as the Pure Platinum A75P only has two DIMM slots, but this is hardly a major issue with the price of 4GB DIMM's these days. The mini PCI Express slot is also missing, but considering that this is a mostly useless feature on a desktop motherboard, we don't see this as a big deal either. The Marvell network controller has been swapped for a cheaper model from Realtek, although on the upside, Sapphire has moved the various buttons on the motherboard to the front of the PCB rather than putting them below the bottom PCI slot.

Having a look at the rear ports it's clear that a feature thinning has taken place, although there are still four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports (with an additional two via an internal pin-header), a PS/2 port, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio and a D-sub, DVI (single link only) and HDMI port. It's a shame that the DisplayPort had to make room for a D-sub connector and the Bluetooth dongle of the Pure Platinum A75 was a neat addition, although we'd rather have the extra internal SATA port over the eSATA port.



A new feature has also been added which Sapphire calls the "Memory Free button" but we have to be honest and say that we have no idea what this does and there are no details about what it does on Sapphire's website either. Overall this looks like a decent enough product if the price is right, but once again Sapphire hasn't really managed to create something that makes it stand out from the competition. No word on pricing or availability as yet, so it's really quite hard to say how well the Pure Platinum A75P will do. Sapphire is also working on a pair of AMD A55 models and at least one AM3+ board, but we have no word on as to when these will be announced.

Source: Sapphire

[goldfinger]

Like to try this new sapphire mobo....perfect design for my own preference.

[nekkabhabes]

yawards sapphire! welcome to the war!

[balipseyev]

Yeah!! pero ig mag butang kay VC murag wala gihapoy gamit ang embedded na GPU dba...

[street_of_no_return]

dili man siya attractive og nawung oe. he he

[eXpLoDe]

i hope nga d ni mapareha sa ilang old mobo(issue).

simple design ra gyud. mao2x ra ug intel.

[breinrules]

A llano chip would be great if paired with an affordable (but durable) mobo. For the a4 chips