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The Sapphire Pure Black 990FX motherboard ships in a nicely designed, futuristic box with the name of the product in the center, and a list of key selling points along the bottom.
Sapphire bundle a software/driver disc, quick start guide, backplate, six SATA cables and a dual port USB 3.0 panel. While the manuals are always well written, Sapphire really to need to spend more time detailing the product… while being multilanguage, they only dedicate 10 pages to the product. There is absolutely no information at all on the bios, for instance. This is fine for an experienced user, but for a first time builder this would be less than ideal. They include the manual on the disc, but if a user only has one system, they have no means to read it until the system is built and running.
The Sapphire Pure Black 990FX Motherboard is built on a dark brown multilayer PCB (they call it black) with light blue coloured ports and darker blue heatsinks. The SATA ports are red, and the USB 3.0 header is a very light blue. We think it would have looked nicer if they had adhered to a two tone colour scheme.
The board has four 240 pin DIMM sockets to support up to 16GB of memory. The blue slots are used first in dual channel configuration. The board supports 800mhz, 1066mhz, 1333mhz, 1600mhz and 1866mhz configurations, with support for higher speeds via overclocking. We will look at this later in the review.
The board is populated with dark blue heatsinks to aid with cooling of the VRM's. They are using high reliability solid capacitors throughout and there is multi-phase PWM voltage regulation circuitry for both the CPU and memory modules which incorporate the SAPPHIRE Diamond Black chokes with coolers that have featured on SAPPHIRE’s high end graphics cards.
There are no less than six PCI E slots (Gen 2) on the Pure Black 990FX motherboard which can cater for 6 single slot cards, or up to three dual slot cards for three way CrossfireX. There is a standard molex connector underneath the slots to deliver a little more power for intensive multi GPU configurations. We didn't need to use this at all during our testing.
There are a total of nine SATA 3/6 GBps ports on the Sapphire Pure Black 990FX board. These feature AHCI and RAID support. Eight of these ports are traditionally mounted horizontally in the direction of the PCB with a ninth port vertically mounted next to the rear I/O panel – ideal for a front panel connected eSATA port.
The board includes a digital debug display and a push button reset for the BIOS, as well as start and system reset buttons. As we mentioned earlier, this is the first Sapphire board to feature the Sapphire QBIOS, which is a tweaked, customised UEFI BIOS. The board has a Dual BIOS, allowing for experimentation and updates, and includes S_BIOS which allows the user to update and back up the BIOS from a BIOS screen – there is no need to boot from an external disk. For the hard-core enthusiast, voltage test pads have been brought out to the edge of the board for the critical voltages on the CPU and memory.
There are fan headers next to the CPU socket, to suit multi fan coolers. There are three more 3 pin headers scattered across the board, to help deal with a variety of chassis designs.
On the back I/O panel are eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth, eSATA port, PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, Coaxial S/PDIF-Out and Optical S/PDIF-Out, dual 10/100/1000 LAN ports and full support for HD 7.1 audio. It really is a fully loaded configuration.
We are using the latest AMD FX8150 Black Edition Processor and are pairing it up with 4GB of G.Skill 2133mhz memory.
For today's review the cooling is supplied by the monster Noctua NH D14, and the graphics are provided by a highly modified Sapphire HD6990. If you want to read more about this ‘Kitguru modded' flagship card, read this followed by this or watch this.
