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1 / 3
Our rating
Reviewed price £70 inc VAT
Despite AMD’s A-series processors being still fairly fresh, Sapphire has opted for an old-fashioned BIOS interface rather than a modern UEFI, which makes it less friendly to setup than we’d have liked. However, the BIOS’s features meet UEFI standards and provide a decent range of processor and memory overclocking options. We were also pleased to find that the motherboard has its own power and reset buttons, which are handy when you’re trying to perfect your overclock before connecting everything to your front panel.This full ATX motherboard looks rather snazzy, too. It has the usual PCI-E x16 slot to accommodate a graphics card and we were pleased to see that there’s enough distance between this and the PCI-E x1 slot next to it, preventing the x1 slot from being blocked by your graphics card’s cooler. There’s another PCI-E x1 slot on the other side of the graphics card slot, as well as an unusual PCI-E x4 slot and two PCI slots. The motherboard also has five SATA3 ports and four memory slots that are capable of taking up to 16GB of RAM, which is much less than most FM1 motherboards. There’s still plenty of room for expansion, but if you want to CrossFire two dedicated graphics cards instead of using Hybrid CrossFireX to link one to the on-chip GPU, you’ll have to look elsewhere.On the back panel are just four USB2 ports and two USB3 ports, although there are four extra USB2 headers on the board and two USB3 headers. Sapphire even provides a 3.5in front panel USB3 connector. The back panel also has an eSATA3 port, six analogue audio outputs served by the usual Realtek chip, as well as DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort graphics outputs. There’s even an integrated Bluetooth adaptor, provided on the off-chance that you might need one.We weren’t, however, impressed by its performance in our benchmark tests, where it scored just 62 overall, although its integrated graphics performances was a decent 28.4fps in Dirt3 at 720p.
Although we’re not fans of its BIOS interface, this is an excellent motherboard in terms of its features. However, we prefer the slightly more expensive Asus F1A75-V PRO, with its greater abundance of USB3 ports and superior performance.
