It's been a while between drinks, but Sapphire's about to release the Pure Black X79N, to match up with the latest Intel chips.
Huh - we did not see that coming.
Way back in the depths of time, Sapphire used to do a line of AMD motherboards (and have even released some in limited runs overseas), but the up until now the company's been mainly focused on video cards. Out of the blue - though there had been rumours that the company was snapping up more mobo engineers last year - Sapphire's just announced the new Pure Black X79N, a shiny new enthusiast grade bit of PCB.
The Pure Black X79N features a new Sapphire UEFI BIOS, dual BIOS capability, voltage test pads and thermal monitors, while server-grade PWM's can deliver up to 270w for heavy OC sessions. The voltage circuitry is made of tried and tested gear from Sapphires VGA range, with Diamond Black chokes, and solid capacitors all over the shop.
The board supports PCIe 3 (don't get us started), with a total of six slots with x16 and x8 bandwidth. The specs are rounded out by Four SATA III 6GB/s and four SATA II slots, two e-SATA ports, six USB 3.0 ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, two ethernet ports and even Bloeutooth.
It's a regular portapalooza, and we'll be getting one as soon as possible.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012