Introduction

Sapphire has been in the game for a long time. The company is best known not only for making video cards, but also for making some of the best on the market when AMD (previously ATI) are on top of their game.

Sapphire getting into motherboards isn't really anything new, as we've seen them offer AMD ones for a while with the Pure line. The bottom line is, though, that AMD haven't been a dominant force in the CPU market for a long time and the Sapphire line of motherboards pretty much slipped under the radar.

Evolving, we see Sapphire offer us not only a performance motherboard, but an Intel one based on the high end X58 chipset. Companies like GIGABYTE and ASUS can offer us both a strong video card and motherboard line-up; but can Sapphire offer us the same?

The Package

Normally we would use our own pictures, but Sapphire changed the packing a bit since the initial version we received, so there's no point showing you one that you're not going to see. Instead we've got the one above which is similar, but the naming stands out a bit more.

The box is fairly plain, but it doesn't need to be all that flashy. It's actually quite classy. Across the bottom we've got some of the main features; we won't get into them as we'll cover them more when we look at the motherboard itself.

Inside the box there's not a whole lot going on. Apart from the standard manual and driver CD we've got the back I/O plate, IDE cable and six black SATA cables.