Sapphire Launches Pure Platinum A85XT Motherboard

Now that the cat is out of the bag with Trinity, AMD’s latest APU, motherboard manufacturers are announcing their product offerings geared towards the new platform. First up is a beefy board from Sapphire, the Pure Platinum A85XT motherboard. Though one of my personal favorite video card brands — especially when overclocking said GPUs — I have yet to take a Sapphire motherboard for a test drive. Let’s see what this new board brings to the table.

Features

The Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT takes full advantage of the all the display options AMD’s Trinity has to offer, including DisplayPort, Dual Link DVI-D, HDMI and VGA outputs (support for up to four independent displays).

Sticking with the connectivity theme, this board features seven SATA III 6Gb/s ports (that’s more than most mainstream Intel boards) and four USB 3.0 ports. Additionally, there are two PCI-Express 16x slots, which means in addition to Trinity’s solid integrated GPU, users can CrossFire two more GPUs.

In terms of overclocking, the Pure Platinum A85XT has a few nifty features like dual UEFI BIOS, Sapphire Diamond Black chokes and multi-phase PWM voltage regulation. While these items would not shock me on a high-end $300+ Intel board from ASUS or Gigabyte, I was impressed to see features like this for an APU that maxes out at $122.

The Bottom Line

The Sapphire Pure Platinum A85XT offers the features of a mid-range overclocking board for a budget APU product, which can only mean one thing for overclockers, low-risk fun without the fear of destroying a $300 CPU or motherboard.