With the release of Phenom II in early January, there has been a lot of focus on AMD's 790GX chipset in terms of support for both the AM2+ and AM3 CPUs.  All AM2+ 790GX boards should support the new CPUs with a simple BIOS flash, however a few motherboards have been specifically sanctioned by AMD for use with the Phenom II.  For the past few weeks, I have had the pleasure of testing the new Sapphire PURE 790GX board, which hopes to be placed into the pantheon of Phenom II compatible motherboards.  Does it measure up?  Read on and find out!

Product Features:

AMD Phenom™ Quad-Core Processors with True Quad-Core Technology

Realize new possibilities for connecting with friends, family, and digital entertainment with the phenomenal performance of the AMD Phenom II™ and Phenom™quad-core processor. Built from the ground up for true quad-core performance, AMD Phenom™ processors speed through advanced multitasking, critical business productivity, advanced visual design and modeling, serious gaming, and visually stunning digital media and entertainment

AMD™ 790GX Chipset: Backbone of the Performance Platform

AMD™ 790GX chipset based PCs feature the latest PCI-Express™ 2.0 bus technology and deliver high performance,  low latency architecture offer one of the industry’s advanced core-logic solutions with qualified performance and the latest technologies-PCI Express 2.0, secure high-speed networking, and high-performance storage—and ensures that your PC stays ready for the newest games, future applications, and next-generation PC specifications.

ATI CrossFireX Technology

With two PCI-Express lanes deliver high transfer rate at each relative direction to support multi graphics engines embedded in VGA cards. With this fantastic design of ATI CrossFireX Technology to link ATI VGA cards graphics engines that will bring up wonderful multiple times of performance than single graphics engine can approached in enthusiast gaming PC.

ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology

To provide better gaming performance than a single graphics card, the innovative design of ATIª Hybrid Graphics Technology is capable to bring additional performance increase up to 1.75X by enabling the power of both integrated graphics core and the add-on graphics card simultaneously

Hyper Transport Technology 3.0

The highly scalable Hyper Transport 3.0 is capable to provide incredible bandwidth of the system bus up to 20.8GB/s which would dramatically elevate the efficiency of computing performance.

AMD New generation of 45nm AMD Socket AM3 processors

The 45nm AM3 processors that support Hyper Transport 3.0 Bus and integrate DDR2 & DDR3 memory controller, To provide advanced visual design and modeling, serious gaming, and visually stunning digital media and entertainment.

GPU Clock Adjustable

Onboard VGA can be overclocked.

Serial ATA 3Gb/s & RAID

This platform supports reliable storage solution for enhanced data protection and data accessing performance. Serial ATA 3Gb/s is firstly introduced in this platform to provide blazingly 3Gb/s bus bandwidth thus higher disk performance. The SATA RAID allows multi-disk designs to be set up as RAID 0, 1,5,10 based on users’ priority of protection/performance, and which even makes more accessible by introducing the innovative windows-based facility

PCI-Express Gigabit LAN

Delivers transfer speed ten times faster than conventional 10/ 100 Ethernet connections, supporting a high transfer rate up to Gigabit/s. Gigabit LAN is the networking standards for the future and is ideal for handing large amount of data such as video, audio, and voice

DVI Interface

DVI (Digital Visual Interface) provides high visual quality of digital display devices such as LCD monitors

OC-CON high-polymer solid electrolysis aluminum capacitors embedded

The working temperature is from 55 degrees Centigrade below zero to 125 degrees Centigrade, OC_CON capacitors possess superior physical characteristics that can be while reducing the working temperature between 20 degrees Centigrade each time, intact extension 10 times of effective product operation lives, at not rising degrees Centigrade of working temperatures each time a relative one, life of product decline 10% only too.

Debug Port / The Professional Hardware Diagnosis System

Being bugged of abnormal system failure through the tossed and turned nights no more, the embedded Hardware Debug Port offers you the real-time visual system healthy for the demanding usage of computing. No more bugging by unknown system failure and no more time wasted in the first moment of 24-hour nonstop ping business computing, the embedded Debug Port will turn you into a well training hardware professional with the seeing system situation.

CPU Vcore 7-Shift / Shift to the scalabilities and flexibilities

The adjustable voltage for CPU Vcore can be upgraded in 31 stages for the precisely hardware dynamic over-clocking of demanding computing performance.

Product Specifications: