Sapphire Pure Platinum A75

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 5 September 2011 at 05:00 AM EDT. Page 7 of 7. 8 Comments.
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Sapphire Technology may not be the most well known vendor of motherboards (the A75 Pure Platinum, for example is their only Hudson-D3-based product at the moment) or have the same popularity as their graphics cards at the moment, but the Pure Platinum A75 is another great motherboard. The Pure Platinum A75 is even more compelling than the Pure Black P67 was for Intel Sandy Bridge.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 has the standard features that other Fusion A-Series/E-Series motherboards have like SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0, but the extras include Bluetooth 2.1, AMD Dual Graphics / CrossFire, Mini PCI Express x1, and other great connectivity options from this motherboard. There are also enthusiast-friendly features on this motherboard like the integrated power/reset switches and a button to clear the CMOS. The overclocking potential out of the Pure Platinum A75 is also great.

The key point to Phoronix readers is also the Linux compatibility. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 should have no problems functioning under recent Linux distributions. The only main item to note is there isn't open-source graphics support "out of the box", but you must be using the very latest Linux kernel / Mesa / DDX until your distribution of choice pulls in all of the latest packages by default. There is also the Catalyst driver on Linux that works fine with Fusion setups for faster performance and taking advantage of more of the Radeon HD graphics capabilities. The icing on the cake for this motherboard is that there is even sensor monitoring support for this desktop motherboard that is working under Linux.

Unfortunately, the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 cannot be found at any major US Internet retailers now, so its retail pricing is not known at the moment.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.