Sapphire Pure Black X79N Motherboard and HD7970 GPU Review

Sapphire are using their latest American Megatrends QBIOS implementation, a fancy name for a UEFI interface. We like the Sapphire interface as it provides live update for voltage, temperatures and speeds, at the bottom of every panel. Very useful.

The Performance tab is where all the overclocking action takes place, so we will come back here shortly.

The Advanced tab allows changes to be made for onboard controllers such as USB and SATA. The H/W monitor section is available here, always a handy page to verify temperatures.

Sapphire also include a motherboard based version of their TriXX software tool, which is useful for Windows based monitoring.

The Chipset tab allows for changes to two settings – VT-d and I/OAT. The Boot menu allows the end user to change drive priority between optical and hard drives. Everything works as we would expect.

Passwords can be configured in the Security tab, and the Exit menu allows the user to save and reset settings, and to override boot settings. At the very bottom is the S-BIOS Flash Utility.

Overclocking the 3960x Extreme Edition processor proved straightforward enough, simply change the core ratio limits for each processor state while adjusting the core voltage to suit. It was possible to achieve 4.2ghz from this board without changing any of the voltage settings, which was impressive and ideal for an end user who is nervous when changing voltages.

We ran into some initial teething problems with the shipping bios, unable to achieve memory speeds above 1600mhz, regardless of settings.

Sapphire sent us their latest beta bios which cured many of our initial problems. Flashing to the latest beta bios was a straightforward process, taking a couple of minutes.

Above, we were able to get high grade G.Skill memory booting at 2,400mhz but total stability was not achieved, regardless of any settings we tried. We tested with G.Skill and Corsair 2,400mhz rated memory. Backing down to 2,133mhz worked fine.

Overclocking Sapphire boards is slightly different, as you work on a principle of +/- mV. To get 1.46V for instance it requires around +300mV. We achieved an overclock of 4.8ghz with voltage set to 1.5. For 24/7 use we would be happy with 4.2ghz, as this required no voltage increases at all, meaning a very quiet, cool running system when paired up with the Corsair H100.

4.6ghz was possible with +200mW (1.46v) which will suit a wide audience who own a quality aircooling solution.

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