14 DAY TRIAL // At this year's Computex fair, Sapphire has introduced a great variety of motherboards based on AMD and Intel chipsets, and recently the company has announced the official launch of one of these solutions, the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75.
Just as its name implies, Sapphire's latest creation is based on the AMD A75 Fusion controller hub, which is the most feature-rich chipset available for FM1 motherboards.
This is installed in the lower left part of the board and just above it Sapphire has placed a PCI Express x16 expansion slot, a pair of PCI-E x1 slots, an open-ended PCI Express x4 slot, as well as two regular 32-bit PCI slots.
In addition to these, Sapphire has also included a mini-PCI-E slot, which could accommodate an mSATA SSD or a Wi-Fi card.
Storage is provided by five SATA 6Gbps ports (only four are angled), which are driven by the AMD A75 chipset, and another such port is routed to the rear I/O panel as an eSATA connector.
Also in the back of the board, users will find a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit LAN connector, a Bluetooth transmitter, a number of USB 2.0 ports, D-Sub, DVI, and HDMI 1.4a video outputs as well as 8-channel HD audio with S/PDIF out.
Two additional USB 3.0 ports are available through an on-board pin header, which is located between the BIOS debug display and the on-board Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons.
CPU power is provided by an 8-phase VRM, and other two phases are used for the DDR3 memory. Sapphire's Pure Platinum A75 also includes dedicated voltage measurement points and dual BIOS chips.
The Sapphire motherboard has already entered mass production and is available for pre-order from various European online retailers starting at €117.19. (via TCMagazine)