Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT Motherboard Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell October 25, 2012 Featured Announcement, Motherboard

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

Performance from the A10 5800K is quite good, and it manages to outperform the Core i3 2105 in the Cryptographic test. Memory bandwidth is quite poor however, scoring around the 12 GB/s mark with the Patriot memory set at 2,133mhz with tight timings.

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Valve overhauls Season Passes / DLC on Steam, for the better

Over the course of 2024, Valve has introduced a ton of new and appreciated pro-consumer features to its Steam platform. From the revamped family sharing to increased integration with the Steam Deck and more, Valve has been putting in the work to continue improving the platform. The latest update sees a new, more transparent / user-friendly approach to DLC and Season Passes.

7 comments

najiro
October 25, 2012 at 10:04 am

Wow! Very nice review. Good job AMD! Really liking this a lot! This is more competitive compared the bulldozers and piledriver processors.
Xtreme
October 25, 2012 at 10:06 am

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….
Manucuna
October 25, 2012 at 10:07 am

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….
Eran
October 25, 2012 at 10:09 am

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
Brian
October 25, 2012 at 10:11 am

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.
Davis
October 25, 2012 at 10:12 am

would make more sense if they did a mini itx version of it for media centers only.