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Sapphire Pure Black 990FX Motherboard Review

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
  • Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
  • Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
  • Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
  • Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

  • SMP – Multi-Processor
  • MC – Multi-Core
  • SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
  • MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
  • GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
  • NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
  • AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
  • IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The Sapphire FX 8150 system comes out on top in the majority of the test, although the Intel system has slightly better memory bandwidth and scores much higher with the SHA256 Cryptographic algorithm.

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10 comments

  1. wow, wicked set up for AMD users. I love that graphics card !

  2. not a very attractive board like the ASROCK fatality series or some of the asus extreme boards, but overall its a heck of a good layout and seems to OC well.

    How often do sapphire update their bioses however?

  3. first time ive seen a sata port in at the same areas the CPu power connector. might be a good idea if you can route the case sata port along the reverse side and out through a hole. keep it neat. But is this any better than having another port in the standard sata area?

  4. plenty of PCIe ports, but not a single gen 3?

  5. The bios looks a lot better than their Z68 and X58 platform boards did.

  6. Didnt they poach a lot of engineers from one of the leading mobo companies anyway? seems like a good thing to do if you want to do it right.

    the layout is good, and I like the SATA port next to CPU socket and I/O panel. its easy to run the front mounted ESATA cable from a case to this location behind the mobo panel.