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Today we are looking at the latest motherboard from Sapphire to support AMD's new FX family of processors, with backwards compatibility for the previous generation AM3 CPUs. The Sapphire Pure Black 990FX is a full sized ATX board targeting the high end AMD enthusiast audience. This is also the first board from the company to feature the latest QBIOS, an easy to use Dual UEFI bios with comprehensive support for overclocking.
Sapphire may not be the first name to jump to mind when considering a new motherboard, but we have had some great experiences with their products in the past. They have always proven to be rock solid with a full feature set, even if the price tags have often been firmly targeted towards the ‘premium sector'.
Sapphire claim that “The build quality of the SAPPHIRE Pure Black 990FX is high. It has a black multilayer PCB, and uses high quality gold plated connectors for USB 3.0 and LAN. It incorporates many of the high end features associated with the SAPPHIRE brand, such as the use of high reliability solid capacitors throughout. The multi-phase PWM voltage regulation circuitry for both the CPU and memory modules incorporate the SAPPHIRE Diamond Black chokes with coolers that have featured on SAPPHIRE’s high end graphics cards. Low profile coolers on the PWM section give users a wide choice of CPU cooler without risk of obstruction.”
Let us take a closer look ….
wow, wicked set up for AMD users. I love that graphics card !
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?
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?
plenty of PCIe ports, but not a single gen 3?
The bios looks a lot better than their Z68 and X58 platform boards did.
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.