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

Sapphire Pure Black X79N Motherboard and HD7970 GPU Review

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

  • Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
  • Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
  • Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
  • Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
  • Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
  • Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Graphics acceleration is disabled to measure pure processor performance.

This software doesn't use all available processing time, instead allowing the end user to encode in the background, primarily unaffected by the demand of MediaEspresso. A time of 8 minutes and 47 seconds is good, well in advance of the last generation 990X system.

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.