Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 Motherboard Review

Sapphire have chosen to use a black and dark blue colour scheme for the Platinum A75 which isn't that different from the colour scheme used on the Asus F1A75-M Pro which we reviewed a few weeks ago. It consists of a black PCB with blue heatsinks and a combination of dark blue and black fittings.

Sapphire have chosen to use the ATX form factor for this motherboard, making it well suited to those building a mid-tower desktop.

If you hadn't already guessed from the name, the Platinum A75 features AMD's top-end A75 FCH (Fusion Controller Hub). This supports four USB3.0 ports in total (two on the I/O panel, two via internal header) and six SATA 6G ports. Five of these can be used to connect your internal SATA devices while the sixth is reserved for an eSATA connection on the I/O panel.

The Platinum A75 features six expansion slots alongside a single mini-PCIe slot which could be used to connect various devices such as a Wi-Fi card. There are two PCI Express x1 slots, a single PCI Express x4 slot, two legacy PCI lanes and a single PCI Express x16 slot, for adding a discrete GPU.

Taking centre stage at the top of the motherboard is the FM1 socket that supports AMD's A8, A6, A4 and E2 APUs. This motherboard is fully compatible with all AM2/AM3/AM3+ CPU coolers on the market.

The power regulation circuitry is located on the left hand side of the APU socket underneath a large blue heatsink. Behind this we find the 8-pin power connector which provides power to the APU.

On the right hand side of the APU socket we find the four DDR3-1600MHz+ RAM slots which support up to 16 GB of RAM. We found that our 1600mhz RAM was automatically clocked to 1333MHz by the motherboard so we had to manually adjust the settings in the bios.

Along the right edge of the board at the bottom we find the five SATA 6G ports. Four of these are angled at 90 degrees with the fifth pointing upwards. These would have looked better with a black or blue finish, rather than red. Below these ports we find the front panel connectors alongside a status LED. Along the bottom edge of the board we find two USB2.0 headers, a USB3.0 header, two fan headers, power and reset buttons and a CMOS reset button.

Sapphire have included a generous selection of I/O connections on the Platinum A75. From left to right we find a PS2 connector, two USB2.0 ports, a Bluetooth indicator LED, two further USB2.0 ports, an eSATA port, DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI outputs, an RJ-45 ethernet connector, two USB3.0 ports and six 3.5mm audio connectors.

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