Sapphire Pure Black X58 Motherboard Review

Sapphire Pure Black X58 System BIOS

Like many of the system BIOS we have seen before, the Main tab of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard BIOS gives you the Basic information about your system. In this case we can see that we are running BIOS version 08.00.16 which is dated 01/11/11, and the CPU that we are using is the Intel Core i7 950 and our total of 6GB of memory. The only changes that we can make are the system date and time.

The second tab of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 system BIOS is the performance page. On this tab we can access the CPU Configuration, Memory Timing Configuration, and Voltage Configuration sub-pages. We also gain access to the Frequency settings of the CPU, PCIe, QPI, and Memory. If we were to scroll down the Performance page we would see the CPU Uncore Frequency and the profile pages for the BIOS.

The CPU configuration sub-page gives us access to the various features of the Intel Core i7 950, and the ability to disable the ones we won’t be using.

The Memory Timing configuration sub-page allows us to set our Corsair Dominator memory manually or we can choose to set it to the XMP Profile.

The Voltage Configuration sub-page is exactly that. Here we can set the various system voltages of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard

This is the lower section of the Voltage Configuration sub-page; here we can manually set the CPU PWM Frequency, DDR PWM Frequency, and the VTT PWM Frequency.

The Advanced tab of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard BIOS gives us access the IDE Configuration, Hardware Health Configuration, USB Configuration, ACPI Configuration, Intel VT-d Configuration, PCI Express Configuration and the Onboard Device Configuration.

The IDE Configuration page allows us to set the SATA Ports to IDE, RAID, or AHCI. For our testing purposes we will be running our Kingston 96GB SSDNow in AHCI mode.

Checking out the Hardware Health Configuration of the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard BIOS we can see the various temperatures, Fan speeds and Voltages currently in use.

Scrolling down on the Hardware Health Configuration page we can configure the fan speeds we want at the various temperatures.

The Onboard Device Settings page allows us to enable or disable the various onboard devices such as the SATA 3.0 Storage Controller, USB 3.0 Controller, HD Audio, and the Marvell 88E8057 Gigabit LAN controller.

The Boot Settings page gives us access to the various boot devices and configuration.

The Security Settings page allows you to set the Supervisor Password and User Password for the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard.

Last but not least is the Exit page. On this particular page we can save changes and exit, discard changes and exit, or simply discard the changes. We can also load the Optimal Defaults on the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard.