Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT FM2 motherboard pictured

Sapphire’s Pure Platinum A85XT is perhaps one of the best FM2 boards we have seen so far and its nice to see Sapphire offering up a high quality A85 board as well as a high quality A75 board for the FM2 socket. The FM2 socket will be supporting AMD’s next generation of APUs for desktops, a.k.a Trinity. The APU socket gets an 8 phase VRM, more than enough for a mid range AMD processor. There are four DIMM slots for two lots of dual channel RAM, speeds are up to 2133MHz as far as we know. In the PCI Express department Trinity will only support PCI Express Generation 2, and hence Sapphire have provided two PCI-E 2.0 X16 slots which drop back to x8/x8 when both populated. 2 way CrossFireX/SLI is more than enough for the FM2 platform.

Other expansion slots on the A85XT are a strangely positioned mPCIe, a PCI-Express 2.0 x4, two PCI-Express 2.0 x1, and two legacy PCI. Seven of the A85 PCH SATA controller’s eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports are assigned as internal ports, with the eighth one as mSATA. There are four USB 3.0 ports, two on the rear panel, and two via headers. Display connectivity includes DVI, D-Sub, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, and 8-channel HD audio complete the package.

Source: TechPowerUp