Sapphire complete Black Seventy Nine CPU Board

[Philip Pierson]

It is been nearly a year to the day since Sapphire kicked off a fresh line of high-end Intel CPU boards, and the producer - contempt being one of AMD's largest partners - is demonstrating no signs of letting up.


Continuing its concentrate on top-of-the-line Intel platforms, the company is now introducing its first enthusiast-class CPU board founded on Intel's X79 chipset; the complete Black X79N.


Let's begin with the obvious; the Complete Black X79N is not completely black. Similar to Sapphire's last Intel offerings, the standard-ATX board characteristic a black PCB with blue, red and silver trimmings.


The blue-on-black color system is rather pleasant, but the red's awkward, and the entire aesthetics suffer from the mis-coped with colors. We would not go as long as to call the X79N bad appearing, but it is not as eye catching as rival solutions.


However, what the board deficiencies in panache, it more than creates up for with a jam-packed characteristic list that adds six complete-size PCI-express port that are well served with bandwidth and couple with on-board jumpers that permit single slots to be disabled.




The Sandy Bridge Extreme processor already furnishes 40 PCIe lanes that can be allocated for up to 4 graphics boards, but assuming things further, Sapphire grabs 16 of those lanes and attach them to an NVIDIA nF200 bridge chip, which in turn multiplexes them and back 32. Therefore, the X79N searches itself skilled with 24 lanes arriving exact from the central processing unit, and 32 arriving from NVIDIA's bridge chip, naking an entire of 56 PCIe lanes spread across the half-a-dozen slots.




There are a property of elaboration capabilities on extends; users can function 3 graphics boards at x16, x16, x16 utilizing the first, third and fifth ports, or 6 individual-slot graphics boards at x16, x8, x8, x8, x8, x8. Handy if you are designing few sort of elaborate folding farm, but there is one catch - despite utilizing an NVIDIA bridging chip, Sapphire does not offer SLI support – it is CrossFire yet, so multi-graphics processing unit gaming answers based on NVIDIA GeForce cards are out of the queries.


The deficiency of SLI is a actual shame for a board as high-end as this, and Sapphire has too decided to extends just four quad-channel DIMM ports. The board supports up to 32 gigabyte of DDRiii memory - which is admittedly overkill for most users - but there is no hiding from the truth that alternative X79 boards arrive skilled with an 8-DIMM plan that can facilitate a staggering 64 gigabyte of random access memory.