A Closer Look
After un-boxing the motherboard, I immediately proceeded to examining the layout of the components on the board. As you can see in the pictures below, the north bridge and the south bridge have passive cooling. The fan-less heat sinks aid in the overall noise reduction of the system.
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One of the major things I tend to look at in enthusiasts boards is the presence of a power and reset buttons on the board instead of pins. The reason that these options could be useful is because they help facilitate the overclocking process. While some manufacturers are reluctant to include these buttons, any serious motherboard will have these. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at the sight of a CMOS reset button, a second bios switch, and diagnostics display which can be seen in the lower left corner of the board which also tells the CPU temperature when the computer is on.
The board also includes plenty of SATA connectors. The two red connectors are SATA III ports whereas the black connectors are SATA II. It is important to realize that the SATA III and SATA II connectors pass through different controllers. The SATA III ports use the Marvell 88SE9128 controller while the SATA II uses the standard Intel’s ICH10R controller. The Marvell controller is capable of implementing RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. It is important to note, however, that in order to take advantage of the SATA III interface with a RAID setup, you will have to destroy and re-create your drive form scratch.
Anther interesting feature of the Sapphire board that tends to get omitted form the newer performance boards is the legacy support. Yes, I am talking about the IDE port. Sure it is not the fastest nor it is the prettiest to look at but those of us who have an old drive and a slight appreciation for extra space are delighted to get a freebie. Speaking of freebies, none can beat integrated bluetooth. The bluetooth module is located right below the south bridge while the antenna occupies as slot in the back panel.
Other feature that this board brags about is the availability of the PCI Express x16 slots, though not all these slots would work at x16. As can be seen in the pictures, the slots are designated as follows: Top: x16, the two middle ones are x8 and the bottom one is a x4 slot. Furthermore, while this board technically has 4 slots, only 3 of them would be usable if you were to install dual slot graphics cards.
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