Even though AMD launched Radeon HD 7970 back in December 22, 2011, it took Sapphire months to perfect their completely custom design in order to create the ultimate HD 7970: Meet the new Sapphire Toxic HD 7970.
With less than a week to go until the official launch of Intel's new 7-series chipset, the first pictures of Sapphires upcoming Pure Platinum Z77 motherboard has appeared and one thing is certain, it's not the same board as the one that was touted as the Pure Black Z77 back at CES in January. The Pure Platinum Z77 appears to be a different breed of motherboard compared to what Sapphire has come up with to date and one of the first boards from the company that we'd seriously consider owning.
Having chatted with Sapphire back at CeBIT a couple of weeks ago, we knew the company is planning on taking a slightly different direction for its future motherboard products and the Pure Platinum A55V looks like it's a step in that direction. What we're looking at is a fairly basic motherboard for AMD's APUs, without being a feature stripped board like what many of Sapphire's competitors are offering when it comes to the A55 chipset.
It's funny how one product can lead to a new and quite different product and in the case of Sapphire the company feels that it's Vapor-X graphics card coolers have been so popular that it's highly likely that we'll see CPU coolers using the Vapor-X technology from the company. As such the company was demoing a new cooler at CeBIT which is very likely to go into mass production sometime in the near future.
One of the most frustrating things when you're at a trade show isn't the crowds, the noise of even the bad lighting when you're trying to take pictures, but actually the Perspex used to cover the hardware, so apologies for the fairly poor pictures of Sapphire's otherwise utterly and totally over the top graphics cards. For whatever reason, Sapphire decided to demo a pair of Radeon HD 7970 cards with 6GB of memory each at CeBIT and the company is considering going with these cards for its next Toxic branded model.
Coming almost a month after the launch of the AMD Radeon 'Tahiti XT' HD 7970 and the 'Graphics Core Next' architecture, the Radeon 'Tahiti Pro' HD 7950 is essentially a stripped down version (87.5%, 1792 out of 2048 Stream Processors) of its more illustrious sibling . The extra lead time and lower TDP requirements has allowed the usual AIB manufacturers to work on non-reference PCB layouts and cooling designs, giving end users more innovation and choice. Today we look at one such offering from Sapphire...
All the boards in our roundup today feature the reference PCB design of the Radeon 'Tahiti XT' HD 7970, with differences only in the pre-programmed default clock speeds, cooling solution, bundled software/accessories, warranties and most crucially, price. We help our readers to make an informed choice...
We tend to be skeptical about AMD or NVIDIA claiming stellar overclocking capabilities of their upcoming GPUs, but this time, it seems AMD wasn't playing the same old PR games. Sapphire is readying a non-reference design HD 7970 graphics card that boasts of 1335 MHz GPU clock speed. Out of the box!
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When it comes to its range of motherboard products, Sapphire has been quite slow to bring new products to market and today the company finally announced its AM3+ motherboard, the Pure Black 990FX. However, we have details of three additional motherboards alongside with pictures, all of which we're expecting should arrive before the end of the year from Sapphire.
Although known more for its AMD Radeon graphics cards, Sapphire always tried to make inroads to the motherboard industry. Not that there are any major hurdles in its way, given that it has a cash-rich OEM (PC Partner) pulling its strings. Come LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E HEDT platform, and Sapphire is out for its slice yet again, with the Pure Black CI7X79N motherboard, of which we scored some early pictures.
It's easy to forget that Sapphire makes motherboards, as the company isn't exactly making a lot of noise about its motherboard products. The company has sneaked out yet another new model and this time we're looking at its second AMD A75 motherboard, the Pure Platinum A75P. This is a lower-end version to the Pure Platinum A75, although it does seem to have a couple of advantages over its higher-end sibling.
Sapphire has released the HD 6950 TOXIC Edition, which at 880MHz core clock is supposedly the fastest factory overclocked HD 6950 in the world.
We didn't get a chance to see Sapphire's Z68 board at Computex, but the board has appeared on the company website as well as being listed by a few online retailers. The motherboard is called the Pure Platinum Z68 and as always with Sapphire boards it brings an interesting mix of features to the table.
Sapphire had quite a few new and upcoming products on display at Computex this year, although not all of its upcoming products where displayed at the show. Click through for some pictures of Sapphire's upcoming AMD motherboards and graphics cards as well as some details on what to expect in the near future.
![[Finalised] Computex 2011 Round-up: Motherboard, Graphics](http://limages.vr-zone.net/index/12470.jpeg)
Finalised. We see loads of upcoming motherboards, graphics card and have sorted them out based on different manufacturers. Enjoy.
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