Sapphire Pure Black X79N (PB-CI7X79N) Pro Reviews

The Sapphire X79N comes to the plate with a higher price tag, which lead me to think there would be a higher performance margin compared to the "lesser" ECS board. Unfortunately the only defining test between the two was the USB 3.0 test segment. I'm not sure this really qualifies the board to be twice the value in cost, nor would I personally get up to buy this board for its features at such pricing. There are more PCIe slots, which would lead me to think it were to be a better board but I was again defeated when I found out there was no support for SLI and I would also be limited to 3-way CrossfireX. It doesn't seem worthwhile to have the extra slots if I can't hardly use half of them. However, to be fair I can do x16 for all three cards whereas the ECS board could only handle three at x8 (via the Nvidia NF200 PCIe bridge chip that can hamper performance because of its additional latency), but to be fair yet again, no SLI support? Not sure there is a "fair" here. There are a lot of things to play with on this board including voltage check points, CMOS reset buttons, and even power buttons on the board itself. Unfortunately I don't think I can justify the additional cost over the ECS for the little additions. Sadly I think this board is great, but with the features it has or is lacking, it isn't worthy of its higher price tag.

The Sapphire Pure Black X79N is a well featured motherboard supporting Intel's latest high-end chipset technology.