Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 Motherboard Review

Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago

Final ThoughtsYou will constantly see Sapphire products being reviewed here at eTeknix and that’s because we believe that they produce some top quality products, at least in terms of graphics cards. This was the first motherboard we’ve looked at from them so based off the Asus and Gigabyte boards we’ve looked at already, it was going to be some big boots to fill.

Now you may know from some of the articles we’ve published lately that we’re sick of review sites who beat around the bush so we’d rather tell it to you straight.

Design wise, we think this board is bang on the money, and live up to the Sapphire brand and the build quality as always is second to none, and if we had our way, we wouldn’t really change a thing as it seems to offer all of the features needed with sufficient room for airflow. Feature wise it’s not exactly lacking, especially in terms of expansion slots and I/O panel goodness and the addition of Bluetooth and Mini PCI-Express are much welcomed and unique to Sapphire, which we feel should give that edge when marketing this board.

Now moving on to the performance, and that all starts with powering the board on, to which being honest gave us a headache of problems in terms of boot loops and more importantly instability, even at stock. We believe most of this was down to the 8GB Corsair Vengeance kit we used but can’t see many new boards on the market supporting kits like this straight out of the box. After a bit of tinkering it seemed things were looking hopeful but still faced us with a few niggly faults in terms of boot looping. Luckily we were given an updated BIOS which was said to increase overall support and stability and after flashing via DOS, it seemed we were using a completely different board.

The stability of this board after the flash was second to none and overclocking as seen was easy and painless and some high clocks were simple to obtain. It proved this by resulting in the highest overclock we’ve had from our A8 3850 APU, and though the BIOS is simple, that helped in the overclock as it made things simple and precise that even a child could do it.

Overall it seems that Sapphire have made a good board here, albeit a few tweaks are needed to make it perfect in our opinion but that’s nothing that a BIOS update or two can’t fix though we would have liked to have seen a UEFI BIOS as we feel Sapphire could make something really special that would create a real buzz in the community, but hopefully that is all to come at a later date. Putting this aside, Sapphire really have a gem here that just needs a bit of polishing, but from flashing the BIOS, we feel the Pure Platinum A75 is definitely something we’d consider buying ourselves.

Pros