Sapphire Pure Platinum A75

While Sapphire Technology is a brand more commonly associated with graphics cards than motherboards, after having great experiences with the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard, we accepted their offer to look at the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 is a motherboard for AMD Fusion "Llano" APUs and packs quite a number of features. Here's how the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 works under Linux.

The Hudson D3-based Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 is compatible with AMD A-Series and E-Series FM1 APUs. If you're hoping to take advantage of the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics support found on these new Fusion APUs, the Sapphire motherboard has DisplayPort / DVI / HDMI outputs. There is also SATA 3.0 ports, USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth 2.1, Mini PCI Express, and other features to be covered by this Phoronix review.

Features:

CPU
- Support AMD Socket FM1: AMD A-series and E-series APU with AMD Radeon HD Graphics

Chipset
- AMD A75 (Hudson-D3 FCH)

BIOS
- AMI BIOS, 16Mb Flash ROM

Memory
- 4 slots 240-pin DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600+ non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- 16 GB Max.

Graphics
- AMD Radeon HD6000 series GPU Integrated in Socket FM1 A-series and E seires APU

Expansion Slots
- 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots
- 1 x MINI PCI-E x1 slots
- 2 x 32-bit PCI slots
- 2 x PCI Express x1 slots
- 1 x PCI Express x4 slots

Storage
- 5 x Serial ATA III 6Gb/s connectors
- Supports HDDs with RAID 0,1,10

Audio
- Realtek ALC892 HD Audio CODEC with 8-Channel

Ethernet LAN
- Marvell 88E8059 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN

Form Factor
- ATX, Size 12" x 9.6"

Contents:

Included with the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard was a USB 3.0 bracket for a 3.5-inch external drive bay, the quick installation guide, a DVD containing the Microsoft Windows 7 support software, two USB cables, and the I/O panel. Also bundled with the Pure Platinum A75 is a coupon for a free copy of DIRT 3, which is a Windows racing game. It's a standard set of accessories included with the motherboard and just what one needs.