Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 Motherboard4. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 Motherboard: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20117. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.58. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Synthetic: PCMark 711. Real World: Blu-Ray Playback with Cyberlink PowerDVD 1112. Real World: MKV Playback13. Real World: Flash HD Performance14. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.515. Gaming: DiRT 316. Gaming: F1 201017. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops18. Gaming: Dead Space 219. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 is certainly a very attractive looking motherboard that reflects the dark blue and black colour scheme that is present throughout Sapphire's motherboard range. This will please those who like to colour co-ordinate their system as blue and black fit in aesthetically with a vast number of components on the market.

The BIOS options were a little limited when compared against competitor products and we would like to see Sapphire implementing a UEFI system like Asus at some point in the future. That said, for less technically-minded users, the Asus UEFI system makes overclocking much easier. In the end we attained great overclocking results from the motherboard, achieving prime stable results at 3.54ghz.

We encountered a few issues with memory compatibility when testing the board and we were forced to use a set of Corsair Dominator 1333Mhz memory. Three other sets of memory I had at hand all gave similar stability problems. This should be sorted by the time the motherboard hits the market. What we did find however, was that onboard graphics performance took a big hit from using lower speed memory. After the review was over we managed to get hold of some Crucial Ballistix 1600mhz gaming memory and it seemed to work well, achieving 1800mhz+ when overclocked.

We don't have any word on the retail pricing of the Pure Platinum A75 motherboard yet but providing it is priced similarly to the A75 motherboards currently on the market, we would definitely recommend it. Sapphire sweeten the deal with a DiRT 3 game code and a USB3.0 front panel unit that will be useful for those who don't have a case that supports USB3.0 natively.

Pros:

• Attractive colour scheme
• Wide selection of expansion slots
• Performs well
• Good overclock

Cons:

• Doesn't feature a UEFI BIOS
• We experienced memory compatibility issues

KitGuru says: Another impressive motherboard from Sapphire that provides a good alternative to the likes of Asus and Gigabyte.

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