Sapphire Pure Black X79N Motherboard and HD7970 GPU Review

The Sapphire Pure Black X79N motherboard arrives in a lovely black and silver box which looks very futuristic. There are a list of the primary specifications along the bottom of the box which is ideal for presentation in a retail store environment.

The Sapphire bundle is better than previous boards, although they still include the full user manual only on the optical disc, which is slightly disappointing. Sapphire supply a USB 3.0 header with rear mounting bracket and screws, 8 SATA cables, I/O backplate and a quick installation guide.

The Sapphire Pure Black X79N is finished with a black PCB (it is actually very dark brown) and blue ports. Not the most eye catching of boards when compared directly against the ASRock X79 Extreme9 or Asus Rampage IV Extreme, but nicely built.

The CPU socket has plenty of space to fit large coolers, with a large heatsink positioned at the very top of the board to help with VRM cooling. There is a single 8 pin CPU power connector here, along with several 3 and 4 pin fan headers. The board has 4 DIMM memory slots, which support 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB DRAMs, for a total of 32GB of memory. Speeds are rated right up to 2,400mhz (OC). Some competitor boards which we have reviewed before are equipped with 8 memory slots, but they are generally priced at £300 or more.

Like many X79 solutions, the X79N board has an active cooling solution beside the SATA ports. This is connected directly into the motherboard.

There are a total of six PCI E slots on the board. PCIE slot 1 is x16 and is Gen3 ready. PCIE slot 2 is x8 and is also Gen 3 ready. Slots 3 to 6 are controlled by the NF200 chip. PCIE 3 is x16/x8 rated, PCIE 4 is x8 rated, PCIE 5 is x16/x8 rated, and PCIE 6 is x8 rated.

The X79N has eight sata ports. The black ports are SATA 2 (3Gbps) rated and the red ports are SATA 3 (6Gbps) rated. The two red ports at the far right are controlled by the Marvell 88SE9128 chip and the rest are controlled by the onboard X79 chipset.

The board is equipped with an LED diagnostic readout, CMOS reset button, and a system reset and power button to the right. This board has two bioses, which can be toggled via the BIOS_SEL switch. Ideal for separate configurations or to recover from a failed boot problem. Sapphire have populated the board with 5 x 3 pin fan headers in various positions, and a 4 pin CPU header. We always like to see 4 or more headers to suit a variety of chassis configurations. Along the bottom of the board are 2x USB 2.0 headers and 2x USB 3.0 headers.

Sapphire have included a 6 pin PCI-E power connector above the PCIE slots to deliver extra power to the board. We didn't need to use this during testing, but it may help with heavily GPU loaded configurations.

The rear panel has a PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector with a total of six USB 2.0 connectors. There is coaxial and optical S/PDIF out and bluetooth capabilities. Sapphire have included two eSATA ports, two 10/100/1000 LAN ports, four USB 3.0 ports and the usual array of audio ports.

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