Sapphire Pure Platinum A75

BIOS:

Sapphire is using an American Megatrends Inc BIOS on the Pure Platinum A75 motherboard. The Aptio Setup Utility has the standard BIOS options one would expect plus various options for tuning and overclocking the Fusion system for maximum performance. It should be quite easy to overclock Fusion APUs with this motherboard. The Fusion A8-3850 (2.9GHz) has been commonly pushed to 3.5~3.6GHz with this motherboard according to others, but our primary focus is on the Linux side, of course.

System Setup:

Sapphire just advertises the Pure Platinum A75 motherboard as just being compatible with Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit editions, but that is not a shock and did not deter us from putting Linux on the system right away. While Sapphire may not officially support it, Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (and 11.10 development snapshots) ran without fault on the Sapphire A75 motherboard. This was similar to the Gigabyte A75 motherboard that also worked under Linux without fault.

It was a fine install and setup experience without issues. On Ubuntu 11.04 there is not any accelerated graphics support "out of the box" due to the older Linux kernel / Mesa / DDX, but the Catalyst driver can be easily installed. The proprietary Catalyst Linux driver fully supports the AMD Fusion Llano APUs, including CrossFire.

If you want to use the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 to take advantage of the open-source Linux graphics drivers, via the Radeon kernel DRM and the Mesa/Gallium3D driver, it works there too assuming you are running the very latest code. In particular, you will need the Linux 3.1 kernel, Mesa 7.11 (or ideally, Mesa 7.12-devel), and the xf86-video-ati Git DDX. The Sapphire motherboard actually worked better than the Gigabyte A75 motherboard when using the open-source driver, as there were not mode-setting issues. See the AMD Llano Graphics Battle: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst where there are many graphics benchmarks from this Sapphire motherboard on both Linux drivers. While the Sapphire motherboard had no Linux mode-setting issues with Radeon KMS, the DVI output is limited to single-link where as the problematic Gigabyte motherboard does support dual-link DVI connections when enabled from its BIOS.

What came as somewhat of a surprise is that the sensor detection and monitoring on this motherboard was even working under Linux! With the f71889a driver, there was real-time monitoring support of the fan speed, voltages, and thermal sensors. It's not too common these days to see brand new motherboards have working LM_Sensors support under Linux, but this was a pleasant change to see with the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75. The k10temp driver in the Linux kernel also works for reporting the CPU temperature.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 was tested with an AMD A8-3850 Fusion APU, 8GB of DDR3-1800MHz RAM, a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, and the integrated Radeon HD 6550D graphics. For benchmarking, Ubuntu 11.04 was used with the Linux 2.6.38, Unity 3.8.10, X.Org Server 1.10.1, AMD Catalyst 11.6, GCC 4.5.2, LLVM 2.8, and the EXT4 file-system.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite, the performance of the Pure Platinum A75 was compared to the Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H motherboard, which now is the only other Llano motherboard we have been testing.