Sapphire Pure Black 990FX Motherboard Review - PAGE 3

The Sapphire Pure will be pitted against previously reviewed AM3+ motherboards using the usual benchmarks.

Test Setup

• AMD FX-8150 processor
• Sapphire Pure Black 990FX motherboard
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 motherboard 
• ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard
• XFX Radeon HD 7970 videocard
• Seagate 750GB 7200.11 hard drive
• Mushkin Joule 800W power Supply
• 2x4GB Mushkin DDR3-1866 9-9-9-24-1T memory
• Corsair Graphite 600T chassis

Benchmarks

• SiSoft Sandra Professional
• 7-Zip
• PCMark 7
• Handbrake
• POV-Ray
• Cinebench
• HDTune
• Far Cry 2
• Colin McRae DiRT 2
• 3DMark 11

Overclocking

Overclocking the Sapphire 990FX board is done in the usual method; the UEFI contains all the necessary settings, but doesn't have much extra. By raising the cores' voltage and multiplier, a clock speed of 4600MHz was not quite doable, but it seemed not too far from the optimal frequency. Therefore, a combination of core multiplier and reference clock adjustment in such a way that the total frequency is slightly lower was set. The core voltage was then dialed down a bit, so as not to give them more than what is needed. With decreased CPU-NB and memory multipliers, the CPU passed the test at 4590MHz, that is 18*255. Then it was a matter of finding the sweet spot between CPU frequency and the other components' frequencies.

So here are the final settings used:

• Reference Clock of 235MHz
• CPU Ratio of x19.5 resulting in 4583MHz
• Memory Ratio of 3:14 resulting in 2193MHz
• CPU/NB Ratio of 11 resulting in 2585MHz
• HT link Ratio of x11 resulting in 2585MHz
• CPU Voltage increase of 200mV
• CPU/NB Voltage increase of 200mV

The Sapphire 990FX ended up very close to the Gigabyte board, although both are eclipsed by the ASUS offering: