Sapphire Pure Black 990FX Motherboard Review

Over the last year we have been on hand to review many of Sapphire's motherboard range for both Intel and AMD platforms. While a relatively minor player in this specific sector, their engineering quality has always proven exemplary.

The Pure Black 990FX Motherboard, released yesterday, has built upon the excellent engineering standards we associate with Sapphire products but this time there is a renewed focus on the bios implementation. Sapphire's new QBIOS might sound like another industry buzz word but it really is a huge step forward for the company. We particularly like the live monitoring system available on the main QBIOS home page, it is both intuitive, responsive and straightforward to analyse. This is particularly important, as their supplied manual doesn't address any of the bios functionality.

When paired up with our modified Sapphire HD6990 graphics card and AMD FX 8150 Black Edition, the system is an almost silent gaming tour de force, with an abundance of scope for performance fine tuning.

Overclocking the Pure Black 990FX was extremely straightforward and we achieved a final clock of 4840mhz by tweaking some of the voltage settings. Those of you using memory specified beyond 1866mhz while need to increase the CPU frequency setting. We overclocked to 220mhz, giving us a DDR3 clock speed 2052mhz, in relation to the FX8150 4840mhz clock speed.

The board layout is exceptionally good, with no less than nine SATA 6Gbps rated ports along with a fully loaded I/O backplate offering USB 3.0, Bluetooth and dual GB lan support. The six PCI E slots will prove useful for people who demand a CrossfireX configuration, or support for many monitors.

Like many other Sapphire motherboards, we need to comment on the stability of the Pure Black 990FX. Throughout testing we never experienced any random BSOD's, and when we pushed the board beyond the limits of the partnering hardware it would recover without a problem, allowing us to lower the settings.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the most impressive motherboard that Sapphire have released to date and if they can maintain this standard they will prove a serious threat for the big players in this sector such as MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS.

No UK pricing has been announced yet, but we expect this product to be priced in the ‘premium' category.

Pros:

• Great new bios implementation.
• extremely stable.
• overclocks great.
• fully loaded.
• impressive PCB layout.

Cons:

• only a quick start guide. no printed user manual.
• Bundle could be better for such a high grade product.

Kitguru says: If you are in the market for a new 990FX motherboard, then this is as good as we have seen.

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