Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard Review

Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard Layout

True to its name, the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard is built using a black PCB, black heatsinks, and is accented with blue PCIe x16 expansion slots, and half of the memory DIMM slots are blue as well. At a minimum the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard is definitely a sharp looking board!

Starting out our tour of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard in this corner, the first and most noticeable feature is the DIMM slots. The Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard supports triple channel memory. The Pure Black X58 motherboard will support up to 24Gb of memory and speeds up to 1600MHz. Just to the right of the DIMM slots is a series of copper pads. These particular copper pads will allow you to check various voltages pumping through the Sapphire Pure black X58 motherboard. The voltages available to check are; CPU vCore, DIMM, CPU VTT, North Bridge, South Bridge, and CPU PLL. Just to the right of the 24 pin motherboard power plug is a 3pin system fan header.

Spinning the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard around, we can see the bulk of our internal connectors. On the right side of the photo we have an IDE connector, followed by a pair of SATA 6 ports (red) and four SATA 3 ports. Rounding the corner we have the colorful front panel header, a fifth SATA 3 port, USB 2 header, and another 3pin system fan header. Just beyond the system fan header is the IEEE1394a header (firewire). Moving just past the Firewire header is the Dual BIOS switched jumper; this little switch will toggle you between the primary BIOS and the secondary BIOS. This can ensure board functionality in the event of a bad BIOS flash.

Swinging the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard around once more, we can catch a view of the onboard buttons that were used quite frequently during our testing (well at least the power button was). Sapphire has placed three buttons on the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard, power, reset, and a clear CMOS. Just past the clear CMOS button is a 3pin system fan header, followed closely by an onboard speaker and a DeBug LED display. Just above the DeBug LED display is the Fintek F71889F Super I/O controller which handles fan speed control and hardware monitoring. The next chip on the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard is the Realtek ALC892 HD audio codec, and just above the set of six solid capacitors is the Marvell 88E8057 Gigabit LAN controller which runs across the PCIe bus. Sitting pretty between the Fintek chip and the Realtek ALC 892 audio codec is the front panel audio and SPDIF headers. Just behind the motherboard mounting hole near the I/O panel is the fourth 3pin system fan header.

Spinning the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard around for the final time today, we can see the fifth of five 3pin system fan headers (behind the stand alone USB ports), as well as the 8pin CPU power plug. To the left of the LGA1366 socket is the 4pin CPU fan header.

The I/O panel of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard takes advantage of a combination keyboard and mouse PS/2 port. There is a total of eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports (blue), a single ESATA port, a single Firewire (IEEE1384a) port and a single RJ45 Ethernet jack. The Realtek ALC 892 High Definition Audio Codec is in charge of the six 3.5mm as well as the Optical and Coaxial SPDIF ports.