John Leyden at the Register only has to write two stories a day - Paul Hales
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Sapphire dives into the Intel motherboard market
THE HARDWARE MAKER Sapphire, best known for making video cards and its cosy relationship with ATI and now AMD, will get into the Intel motherboard market with two high-end boards.
Motherboards are nothing new for Sapphire, as it has offered AMD based models before. But its high-end Sapphire Pure Black X58 is a statement of intent, a fully featured mainboard that supports Intel Core i7 processors and incorporates the Intel X58 chipset.
Complete with a blue and white colour scheme and targeted at enthusiasts, it includes USB 3.0 built-in, SATA ports, six dual channel DDR3 memory slots, a load of peripheral connections and on-board 8-channel audio. It's also designed to support overclocking with "highly stable" power sections.
More intriguingly, Sapphire is also releasing another board that supports Intel's range of Sandy Bridge processors, known as the Pure Black P67 Hydra. Feature-wise it is pretty similar to the X58 model, but it also uses a Lucid Hydra chip that allows the use of a mix of graphics cards.
You'll have to wait a little while to get hold of these motherboards as Sapphire has not set a release date yet, but it did say that the boards are already in production. µ
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@Jorge:
Can you clarify what exactly you mean by "operational deficiencies" and "had a good relationship with ATI/AMD"?
I don't see them having a bad relationship at all. With Fusion and SandyBridge taking away market share from low end parts it is only a logical step to move into this market and it has nothing to do with desperation.
Were you mistreated by SAPPHIRE in the past?
I agree that the customer support on the mainboard side was never really good, but hopefully this will change with the new team they seem to have (rumors talk about some people from EVGA joining SAPPHIRE).
So lets see :)
I would have to agree with the above poster. Though I can now see Sapphire coming out with high end boards based on the Bulldozer design for AMD in the coming months.
Sapphire has produced some good ATI OE spec Vid cards over the years but their mobo implementation and complete lack of customer support has hurt them. I suspect that jumping onto Sandy Bridge which is for all practical purposes a lateral move for InHell, is a desperation move by Sapphire to stay in business.
It's unfortunate that Sapphire is unable or unwilling to correct their operational deficiencies so they can become of significant, as they had (past tense) a good relationship with ATI/AMD in the past.