14 DAY TRIAL // It certainly took Sapphire a while to come out with the Pure Black 990FX motherboard for AM3+ processors it showcased back in June of this year, but the company has now finally made available this solution to its customers.
The Pure Black 990FX features the same black PCB that is characteristic to all Sapphire’s high-end motherboards and is targeting enthusiast users who are considering buying an AMD Bulldozer rig.
As a result, the board features no less than six PCI Express x16 slots, which can support up to four graphics cards.
Despite the high number of PCI-E slots available, enthusiasts will be limited at running only CrossFireX configurations on the Pure Black 990FX, since Sapphire lacks a license for SLI (Nvidia grants them only to manufacturers that already have a license for Intel platforms).
As far as storage options are concerned, Sapphire has installed no less than nine internal SATA ports (six are SATA 6.0 Gbps, the rest are 3.0 Gbps) on the Pure Black 990FX-N, as well as two eSATA connectors.
Also on the rear I/O panel, users will find a pair of USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth, dual Gigabit LAN ports, no less than eight USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port as well as 7.1-channel audio with digital and coaxial S/PDIF outputs.
Two other USB 3.0 ports are available through a pin header that is placed right near the SATA connectors and is angled at 90 degrees.
As is usually the case with high-end motherboards, the Pure Black 990FX-N features on-board Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons as well as a BIOS debug LCD.
Power is provided by a 10-phase VRM which supports all of AMD's FX-Series Bulldozer processors.
Sapphire has already started shipping the Pure Black 990FX according to TechPowerUp and the board can be found listed with a price tag of 159.90 EUR ($211 US).