Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT (A85X) Motherboard Review

Last month saw the release of AMD’s latest platform; FM2 which features a whole new range of APU processors, codenamed Trinity and offers a nice upgrade from the original FM1 Llano range of products.

With a new platform or socket, we see a barrage of manufacturers aiming to get their products to market as quickly as possible and this includes some of the biggest brands on the market. One of these brands however, are more well known for their VGA graphics based products and are a primary AMD Radeon partner, and of course we can only be talking about Sapphire.

Sapphire have been developing motherboards for a couple of years now and have been branding them under their “Pure Platinum” moniker and with the new A85X chipset being released for the FM2 platform, Sapphire have developed their very own Pure Platinum A85XT board that we have with us today.

When we tested the other FM2 boards at launch, we only had access to an A8 APU, but since receiving a multitude of different boards from different partners, we’ve managed to secure the flagship A10-5800k which we will be testing with today and using to compare against the boards we’ve already reviewed.

Sapphire boards have been a bit of a mixed bag in the past, so it should be interesting to see what Sapphire have managed to do in terms of performance, style and features, but before we look at all that, we need to take a quick look at the package and any added accessories. Once this is out the way, we can move on to the board design and features and then move on to the area that we’re all interested in; performance, benchmarks and of course, overclocking.