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Sapphire motherboard box artwork is always very similar – following a futuristic black and silver scheme. The Pure Platinum A85XT hasn't broken the mould, but it is quite attractively designed.
Sapphire include 6 SATA cables, a USB 3.0 adapter, quick installation guide, software DVD installation disc and I/O backplate. Sapphire don't bundle a full, printed user manual, instead including it on the optical disc in printable format. I find this a continually disappointing aspect of buying a Sapphire motherboard, because unless you have a secondary system you have no means of reading the full PDF user manual while building the system.
As we would expect, the Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT is built to very exacting standards. It is a black PCB design with high quality gold plated connectors for USB 3.0 and LAN ports. They are using high reliability Japanese solid capacitors in this design. There is a multi phase PWM voltage regulation circuitry incorporated for both the APU and memory modules.
Sapphire use their trademarked Diamond Black chokes with cooler that have featured on some of their high end graphics cards. The chipset is passively cooled and there are low profile heatsinks on the VRM modules to ensure that oversized CPU coolers can be installed without problem.
The Pure Platinum A85XT measures 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm conforming to the ATX standard. It isn't the most attractive looking motherboard, especially when side by side with the Gigabyte F2A85X UP4 which is black and grey coordinated across the ports and slots.
The 6+2 phase PWM controller is maintained by the International Rectifiers IR3567A voltage regulation chip.
At the bottom of the board is a diagnostic read out which can help with troubleshooting. Again you need to refer to the user manual which is saved in digital format on the optical disc. Printing this out would be a wise first move.
The Pure Platinum A85XT is a dual channel motherboard with four slots supporting up to 32GB of DDR3 memory. Gigabyte officially claim their board will support up to 64GB of memory.
The Sapphire board will support 1066/1333/1600/1866mhz memory, but as we see later in the review, it is possible to push this further.
The Pure Platinum A85XT has two PCI-e graphics card slots which can be used for Crossfire (no SLI as Sapphire are a primary AMD partner). A single card in the secondary slot will run at x16 speed, however if you add two they downgrade to x8 bandwidth. This doesn't really have any effect in the real world however as we have seen with previous test results.
There is also a PCI-e x4 and two PCI-e x1 slots to support older devices. If you pay careful attention you can see a onboard mPCIe/mSATA slot between the two primary graphics card slots. This is useful to have, but installed in a rather unusual position on the PCB. We have reviewed a handful of mSATA devices already, and this one in particular is worth consideration.
Along the bottom of the motherboard is a RESET CMOS button, next to a RESET and POWER button. Sapphire have incorporated a dual BIOS configuration on this board, and it is easily to switch between these by sliding the Bios_Sel button left or right.
There are plenty of fan header ports on this board, with several positioned along the bottom row, handy for specific chassis designs.
The 8 PIN CPU power header is between the top PWM heatsink and the rear I/O panel as shown above. You can see the power delivery chokes and Solid Capacitors in the image above right (next to the heatsink).
There are no less than 7 SATA 6 Gbps ports on this board, with three of them mounted vertically. I would have preferred all of these to be installed parallel to the PCB. There is support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. The front panel header is positioned just below the SATA ports.
The rear I/O panel has four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort, VGA and DVI out, Gigabit LAN, BlueTooth Module, Combo keyboard PS/2 and mouse port, Optical S/PDIF out and 8 channel audio ports.
Wow! Very nice review. Good job AMD! Really liking this a lot! This is more competitive compared the bulldozers and piledriver processors.
Its quite an ugly looking motherboard on a colour scheme level (not important to some I guess). thankfully they seem to be improving their bioses. been following their motherboards here since they started doing them….
Its quite an ugly looking motherboard on a colour scheme level (not important to some I guess). thankfully they seem to be improving their bioses. been following their motherboards here since they started doing them….
I like this new range of low end processors from AMD, they perform really well. anyone remember ATOM? yeah, not fondly. it was sh$t
That SATA arrangement seems unnecessary. I can only assume the engineering wiring on the multi layer PCB had to be routed a specific way making the layout impossible for level port positioning.
I suppose you could use the angled connectors, although they might still connect with a larger graphics card.
Who uses mSATA however? the drives are very expensive.
would make more sense if they did a mini itx version of it for media centers only.