Home / Tech News / Featured Tech Reviews / Sapphire Pure Black X79N Motherboard and HD7970 GPU Review

Sapphire Pure Black X79N Motherboard and HD7970 GPU Review

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

  • Slate: A node based material editor.
  • Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
  • Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
  • 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
  • Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
  • Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
  • Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
  • Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
  • Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
  • FBX file linking
  • Save to Previous Release (2010)

We created a new 8200×3200 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render.

Good scores, although a little lower than other X79 systems, as we are using slightly slower 1866mhz memory this time. Rendering performance can be affected by memory bandwidth.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

First AMD UDNA GPUs expected in 2026

AMD's unreleased UDNA GPU architecture is back in the news, with a fresh leak suggesting …

11 comments

  1. Nice system this would make. The 7970 is brilliant and the motherboard seems well made, much like everything sapphire do. I dont really like their bioses however as I think they are adopting a different style of overclocking than everyone else with those mv. why not just make it core voltage and have direct keying in on the field like everyone else?

  2. Sapphire are trying hard in the motherboard arena, they face such stiff competition however that they would need to focus on getting their pricing down. The Z68 board for instance cost more here than many of the ASUS products, and I dont think it sold very well

  3. I am waiting on toxic or vaporx card from sapphire before buying a 7970. The AMD reference coolers suck, even this one, which I hear is better.

    Motherboard looks ok, I like the fact Sapphire seem to be making everything themselves, including their custom bios configurations.

  4. They seem to make good boards and I would buy one, but they seem hard to get in the UK even if I wanted to.

  5. Didnt even know they made motherboards!

  6. Hope they release a good VaporX edition soon. those reference cards dont appeal to me at all.