In the last 6 months Sapphire has returned to the motherboard arena with a whole slew of motherboards for both Intel and AMD platforms. Today we have their enthusiast offering for those jumping on board of the Intel Sandy Bridge-E platform with the LGA 2011 socket and X79 chipset – the PURE Black X79N.
As we have come to expect from Sapphire, we have a black PCB with colourful blue and red accents. At the top of the board (right on the image above) we have Intel’s LGA 2011 socket and four quad-channel DDR3 DIMM slots. As for chipset cooling we see that Sapphire has followed a handful of other manufacturers and opted for a fan-cooled solution rather than a passive heat-sink.
When it comes to on-board connectivity we have a total of 6 physical PCIe x16 slots, but they are a mix of PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 with 1x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, 1x PCIe 3.0 x8, 2x PCIe 2.0 x16 and 2x PCIe 2.0 x8 slots. This shouldn’t be cause for concern as there is plenty of bandwidth to go around thanks to the inclusion of an NF200 chip, but it’s still a little confusing! We also have a total of 8 SATA ports (4x SATA2 and 4X SATA3), a single USB 3.0 internal header, 2x USB 2.0 internal headers, power/reset/clear CMOS buttons as well as a diagnostic LED.
Moving around back we have a very well-equipped back I/O with a combo PS/2 port, 4x USB 3.0, 6x USB 2.0, 2x eSATA, dual gigabit LAN, 8-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF-out as well as integrated Bluetooth 2.1.
Overall, the PURE Black X79N from Sapphire is a decently-equipped X79 motherboard that will surely impress as long as it comes out at the right price, however, if Sapphire is unable to undercut the competition we don’t see this motherboard being much a success. For more on this motherboard, head over to the official Sapphire product page!
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