Sapphire's 790FX board pixellated

8 Nov 2007 | 14:00 GMT

By Theo Valich

DAAMIT'S PARTNERS ARE braced for impact, preparing for something that is going to be biggest ATI-AMD launch ever. Radeon HD 3800 series will be launched in seven days, on Thursday November 15th, with AMD Phenom CPUs and 790FX/790X/770 motherboards being launched on following Monday (Nov 19th).

Thanks to bird named Phoenix, our marvelous hunter for hidden corners of the Interweb, we got a link to Sapphire's official website portraying its latest product, PURE CrossfireX.

Box and motherboard shot show Sapphire had to follow corporate colours of AMD: Black and Green dominate

The motherboard comes with a black PCB, so Sapphire called it quits on that unique white-and-red PCB from yesteryear. As you can see on the box, the PURE CrossfireX 790FX will support three graphics cards and a physics Expansion slot. It seems that Ageia is preparing second generation PhysX card, and this time around they are not going to screw themselves with a product that uses a dying interface like PCI. This short-sighted call cost both Ageia and Killer NIC, but we'll see what will happen in the future.

Only thing that worries is that DIMMs are not far apart from the CPU cooler zone. Remember Corsair Dominators and nF 590?

Analysing the PCB itself, we see that complete power management is done by Volterra chips. This motherboard comes with DVRM or Digital PWM - everything is configurable, even some basic Owners of this board, Radeon 2900XT/3850/3870 cards and SSD drives will be able to say that they have first completely digital computer. No analogue circuitry whatsoever, and this will enable real tweaking of every possible system parameter.

Thanks to lowered power consumption, the heatpipe setup to cool down the SB600 SouthBridge and RD790 NorthBridge chips is more optional, but this setup delivers some serious overclocking headroom. GigaByte's 790FX has proven to be quite a surprise in HyperTransport overclocking, so we wonder how will this one turn out.

PURE CrossFireX 790FX sports six SATA-II ports, six USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire, two headers for additional 4 USB ports (unless you fit one header with Hiper PSU header, then you bring additional eight ports), IDE and Floppy cabling - and of course, DFI's finest: debug LED, and big Reset and Power on switches.

What do we have in the left corner?

Taking a closer look at the motherboard, first thing that we are seeing here is LanParty's mark - bringing an end to speculation as to who is going to manufacture this motherboard. Sapphire opted for DFI (formerly known as Diamond Flower Int'l), and this is probably the best possible combination.

We're surprised by the absence of Sapphire markings on the board, but we'll see what will happen when the final version of the product kicks in. In our article about the world's first showing of AMD's Spider setup, we saw LanParty motherboard markings, and this now confirms that the setup in Seattle was world's first Spider – all made with parts from Sapphire (sans the Phenom engineering sample).

You can access the webpage yourself (until somebody at Sapphire has a heart episode and shuts the page down). Our complementary l'INQ is below. µ

L'INQ
Sapphire's Media Gallery with 790FX

See Also
RD790, Phenom, Spider computer pictured in Seattle

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007