Pay attention to screw holes on the heat sink. Besides, the chipset has TDP of just 10 W, so it does not need such devices, plain heat sinks would do fine. ![]() Our tests have proved that it's an adequate cooling system without any bells and whistles. However, manual labor of assemblers has also a positive effect for users: high quality elastic thermal grease is applied to each chip in the voltage regulator. They are prone to roll out all over the board. The cooling system removed, you pay attention to low technological effectiveness of the retention: screws are certainly more reliable than usual clips, but engineers use piles of plastic washers not to damage chips during installation. This design has a safety margin for increased heat release, for example in case of overclocking. In this case the main heat sink is cooled by convection created by the cooling system in a PC case, because it's connected with the environment outside the computer. It goes without saying that the heat sinks are connected with heat pipes, like in all expensive motherboards. The cooling system consists of a large heat sink for the voltage regulator and a couple of compact heat sinks on chipset bridges. ![]() The board has a POST indicator and buttons to power on/off and reset the system. You will also have two PCI slots (one of them may be occupied by the bundled VoIP card). Besides, SATA ports and a floppy connector in this zone are installed on their sides. The first and the second graphics ports are placed so that long dual-slot Radeon HD3870 X2 cards won't hamper access to on-board connectors, including those for brackets with USB and FireWire. On the other hand, you may build the fastest Quad CrossFire using two Radeon HD3870 X2, so even three slots look excessive. Not as impressive as in MSI K9A2 Platinum, which allows to install four dual-slot cards. The motherboard supports CrossFireX - you can install two graphics cards with dual-slot cooling systems and one single-slot card into three PCI Express x16 2.0 slots. Besides, the bundle lacks a corresponding bracket, which could have been connected to one of six on-board ports (you'll have to buy it on your own). It's a pity the motherboard does not have an eSATA port on the rear panel. So there are no reasons to be dissatisfied: you can plug everything you may possibly need. As it uses SB600 for Southbridge (instead of SB700, which is actively used for motherboards on AMD 780G), engineers supplemented chipset-based functionality with additional controllers. Meanwhile, Sapphire, being an exclusive partner, used the AMD colors and a large logo in the box design.Īs we expected, the motherboard has a packed design. And there are no manufacturers producing motherboards exclusively on Intel chipsets. Especially as Intel does not manufacture motherboards on its own - it places orders with Foxconn and ECS. If you want a consistent brand for your motherboard, it makes sense to consider products from exclusive partners (like Sapphire), which produce cards and motherboards solely on AMD chips. You don't have to be a follower to choose a modern motherboard, for example on the 790FX. ![]() On the other hand, what about motherboards? AMD chipsets are very good. Well, we can say that such graphics cards are manufactured by AMD. ![]() And since modern graphics cards (especially expensive ones) have reference designs, they are mostly manufactured at several plants by AMD's orders and only then distributed between partners for packaging and sales. On one hand, consistent AMD followers can choose a processor with a chipset, plus a graphics card with a GPU from AMD. AMD 790FX chipset (AMD 790FX Northbridge + SB600 Southbridge)įor a long time already, Intel followers, who consistently choose PC components from this manufacturer, have had an opportunity to choose a processor, chipset, and motherboard of the same brand.
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