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Review: Sapphire PURE Platinum A75 motherboard

by Tarinder Sandhu on 9 August 2011, 12:33 3.5

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa6t7

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How we test

 

Comparison systems

Motherboard Sapphire PURE Platinum A75 ASUS F1A75-V PRO ASRock A75 Pro4 ASUS P8Z68-V PRO
Motherboard BIOS x34 0802 1.50 0651
Processor AMD A8-3850 Intel Core i3-2100
Chipset driver AMD Catalyst 11.6 Intel Inf 9.20.1030
Memory Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3
Memory timings 9-9-9-24-2T @ 1,600MHz
Graphics N/A
Disk drive Corsair V128 SSD
Optical drive Sony AD-7263S
Chassis Corsair Graphite 600T
Power supply Zalman 400W
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

CPU and memory benchmarks

AIDA64 The successor to Everest - useful for measuring memory bandwidth and latency
HEXUS.PiFast
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places
wPrime 2.0.4 Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads
CINEBENCH 11.5 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
7zip 9.20 We use the built-in benchmark in this open-source file-compression utility
TrueCrypt 7.0a An encryption/decryption benchmark that's partial to AES acceleration

Integrated GPU benchmarks

Just Cause 2 DX10, 1,280x720 low/medium quality
Call of Duty: Black Ops DX9, 1,280x720, low/medium quality
3DMark Vantage b1.2 DX10, Run at the default performance preset

General benchmarks

Storage performance USB 3.0 read/write speed via AS SSD benchmark
Power consumption While idling, running wPrime and Just Cause 2

Testing notes

We're testing the PURE Platinum in two ways. First off, it's a straight comparison against two other FM1 motherboards and an Intel Core i3-2100 chip on a Z68 motherboard.

Secondly, taking into account the enthusiast-level features on the board, we have run the A8-3850 APU at a roughly-matching frequency but with a 133MHz clock - 2,926MHz, 133MHz clock, 22x multiplier, DDR3-1,773. Doing so ramps up the graphics speed.