Who makes Sapphire PURE Black X58?

[Mescalamba]

I noticed that Sapphire released motherboard for X58, which looks quite good, but question is, who designed and made that thing? Any ideas?

They used DFi design once, but no clue about this..

So, who knows? :)

[century child]

From what I have read, Sapphire now has their own motherboard design team, which consists of EVGA's previous team. They all left and migrated to Sapphire a while back.

[EniGmA1987]

Sapphire is a pretty massive company, not in the MB world but with graphics cards. I think they make the AMD OEM cards as well as their own branded ones. Wouldn't surprise me at all if Sapphire made the motherboards themselves. Especially if they picked up a lot of the EVGA motherboard guys

[Mescalamba]

eVGA team? Thats pretty good news. :)

[RADCOM]

So what happened to EVGA?

[Mescalamba]

So what happened to EVGA?

Good question, but I think they still produce mobos? Maybe it was just part of team..

[akula2]

Sapphire is a pretty massive company, not in the MB world but with graphics cards. I think they make the AMD OEM cards as well as their own branded ones. Wouldn't surprise me at all if Sapphire made the motherboards themselves. Especially if they picked up a lot of the EVGA motherboard guys
does that mean it makes more sense to go with their mobos coz for better graphics card performance compared to gigabyte, asus etc :confused: they should've started with p67. anyway, good they didn't coz of sandy's bug but me thinks sapphire arrived late into x58 scene. anyone has any review of their mobo?

[sin0822]

nah i don't think they arrived late they had sent out a lot of review samples, but i am not sure about total production. I wouldn't be surprised if they outsourced their board manufacturing, as Gigabyte and Asus are the last remaining companies that design and manufacturer.

[akula2]

nah i don't think they arrived late they had sent out a lot of review samples, but i am not sure about total production. I wouldn't be surprised if they outsourced their board manufacturing, as Gigabyte and Asus are the last remaining companies that design and manufacturer.
late means, they should have planned their mobos along with bloomfield processor launch. many mobo makers sell their products like hot cakes with the newly launched processors. only recent processors were 950/960, isn't it? so kinda no so big market available for them to tap, especially lots of folks gone into p55 machines and many have lined up for sandy bridge. so that's why i thought they were late. but still they could sell boards even now coz of a few leftover advantages over others like p55/p67 such as for lot of pci lanes, high threaded apps etc.

[sin0822]

yea sorry they are late, but not that late because the 990x hasn't come out yet. I thought they released a P67 boar d lol.

[Mescalamba]

Theres review in last "The Overclocker". Seems like really decent mobo.

[Falkentyne]

So what happened to EVGA?

I want to know, too.
How come their motherboard team abandoned ship?

[Johnny87au]

This board supports lucid hydra support which should come in handy, bit late though men

[nijel]

I don't know man... See what guru3d has to say about it. Different board but still applies:


The one negative has to be the inclusion of the Hydra chip, MSI preferred it over an NF200 controller(s), with a board like this you at the very least want 3-way SLI as an alternative right? Well, nope, 2-way SLI is supported and it ends there. Now the Hydra IC will allow you a 3/4-way multi-GPU setup as well, but really... Lucid Hydra sucks badly. It is the most sub-par solution you can opt as an ODM, yet they keep implementing it as hey... it's another feature on the box. That really has to stop as it's harming the Marshal more than it does good.

Another cruel pointer is the available PCIe bandwidth on the PCie slots, this board has eight PCie x16 slots, but four of them really function only as x1 slots while the other four share x32 available PCIe lanes, that does sit right at all. And that again it tracks back to the Hydra IC. My advise to the MSI R&D team for future boards, kick out the LT22102 IC and let Hydra die a slow death, implement NF200 chips and do it properly the next time. Hydra is nothing more than a questionable compromise and after a full year of nothing other then negative coverage from the media on it, ODM's please take this less than subtle hint... we-do-not-want-it.