Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT (A85X) Motherboard Review

I mentioned at the start of this review, that Sapphire motherboards have been a bit of a mixed bag, as they seem to excel in one area but lack in others, and that is typically the fault of the BIOS, but today we see that Sapphire has completely shaken things up and improved dramatically in so many areas.

I’ve always been a fan of the styling and design behind Sapphire motherboards and they always seem to give off a quality feel and this is no exception by all means. The design really is simple yet shows that the board can mean business, if pushed to the limits and that’s exactly what we did today. With the stock performance, straight out of the box we saw some strong numbers showing that this board at default is a powerful contender for Asus, MSI, ASRock and Gigabyte who as we know are the main key players in this game. The overclock to 4.4GHz was easy to obtain and required very little effort to get the results we wanted and once we were at 4.4GHz, we saw the performance gains to be quite fruitful and were pleased overall with the boosted numbers that we saw across our tests.

Key areas that this board excelled with were SATA, USB and power consumption, which it seemed to handle in its stride and it shows that Sapphire have learnt from their mistakes and just needed a little bit more time to fine tweak their functionality and technology, and as we know with their VGA based products, they are a market leader, and maybe now is the time we will see that transfer over to their motherboard segment.

The area of this board that I’m over the moon about is the BIOS, as this is something I’ve moaned about to our contacts at Sapphire for some time, but things like this always take time and it shows all that was needed was exactly that; time. Now that the BIOS has had time to mature, it’s offering a simple design with an easy to use interface and something that can see great results from so kudos to Sapphire for listening to their consumers and sites like ourselves and developing what the people want.

Price wise, the board will set you back around £105, which slightly undercuts the competition by around £10-£20, which is a great selling point for Sapphire, and though its cheaper, you don’t seem to lose anything in terms of quality, performance or even the bundle thats on offer, which was nice to see some added extras such as the USB 3.0 panel.

This has been one of the most surprising FM2 boards I’ve tested since the launch, as I had reserved my mind that it was going to be similar to their previous boards, and I can now honestly say that I’m happy to eat my words, and would highly recommend this board to anyone looking at an AMD FM2 platform and requires a high-power, high-performing motherboard with no flaws. If that’s what you’re after, then this is definitely the board for you.