Jun 1, 2011 13:32 GMT  ·  By

Sapphire has been absent for quite a long time from the Intel motherboard scene, but starting with this year the company is back in full swing and in the forth quarter of 2011 will introduce one of the most interesting X79 Express boards to make its appearance at Computex, the X79 Pure Black.

Right now, Sapphire refers to this board as the PB-CI7X78N as this is still a pre-production sample, but the final version should look pretty much identical to this model.

This means that users will get no less than six PCI Express x16 slots, which are compatible with AMD CrossFireX setups (Sapphire doesn't have a licence for Nvidia SLI).

The first one of this is marked as a PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slot, while the second one is also a Gen 3 slot, but has only four PCI-E lanes routed to it. The remaining four slots are a mix of PCI-E x16 and x8 sockets.

Since the PCI Express controller integrated inside the Sandy Bridge-E processors has only 40 PCI-E lanes available, Sapphire had to use a bridge chip for providing such a high count of PCI Express slots.

This is placed right near the X79 PCH, but its manufacturer is unknown.

The board's expansion options are completed by no less than 10 SATA 6Gbps ports, which are all driven by the Intel X79 chipset.

As is the case with other LGA 2011 motherboards, the Sapphire Pure Black X79 also features eSATA and USB 3.0 connectivity as well as a series of other overclocking-oriented features such as a BIOS debug display and on-board Clear CMOS, Power and Reset buttons. In addition, Sapphire's creation also sports Bluetooth capabilities.

Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processors are expected to debut in the forth quarter of 2011 and the initial CPU batch will include three chips, two featuring a six-core design and a quad-core model.

The Sapphire X79 Pure Black is also expected to arrive in Q4 2011. (via VR-Zone)