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SAPPHIRE PURE 780G AMD MOTHERBOARD
The Motherboard:
As we pulled the motherboard from the packaging, we were delighted to find that component placement through-out the motherboard was carefully thought of for easy plugin and installation. We were happy to see that Sapphire continued the red color scheme for this motherboard which allows the components mounted to it to really jump-out at you and allows easy visibility for finding certain areas of the motherboard using the manual. We took a quick measurement of this board and found it to be 8.63" x 9.75" .
Taking a closer look we find that all of the chipsets that require cooling are handily equipped with a heat sink but no fans which is great for making this into a quieter operating Home Theater PC or a very quiet desktop PC. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the heatsinks later during our tests to see if they might need any additional cooling since this motherboard will most likely be in a small confined case.
We were very pleased to find that this micro-ATX motherboard had four DIMM sockets, which is rare for small form factor motherboards, for a maximum of 8 gigabytes of memory. The DDR2 memory controller, seen in the 1st image below with the silver label just below the LED readout, provides this motherboard with 200MHz/333MHz/400MHz memory clock frequencies for dual channel DDR2 533 / DDR2 667 / DDR2 800 DDR2 Modules. The slots are colored coded to help make sure that you get them in the correct places for dual channel mode.We noticed that there is a single PCI-Express 2.0 X16 slot, and a pair of PCI slots, a single IDE connector and a single floppy connector. Taking an even closer look we notice the power supply connector will work with either a 20 or 24 pin connection from your power supply. The PCI- Express 2.0 x16 slot can deliver up to 8 Gb's per second of graphics bandwidth and you the option of using either a single graphics card solution here or you can use the single graphics card in conjunction with the Intergraded Graphics Processor or IGP for the enhanced performance function of the Crossfire Hybrid Graphics solution that this board provides to the user. Above the PCI-e slot you can easily see the large passive heat sink for the 780G north bridge chip. In the next image, we find to the right of the PCI slots, the AMD SB700 south bridge chip covered with a smaller passive heatsink than the northbridge chip, and can also se the CMOS battery.
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