It's been a heck of an interesting week, hasn't it? NVIDIA has seen the light (and the cash) at the end of the tunnel, AMD's gone out with the old and in with the new, and now Sapphire - one of AMD's biggest partners - is introducing a line of high-end Intel motherboards.
Kicking off the range is the Pure Black X58. Launched as Sapphire's first Intel solution for the high-end sector, the extreme board is designed to "appeal to the enthusiast" and features a bevy of overclocker-friendly features.
Based on the X58 chipset, the board supports Intel LGA1366 processors - including the range-topping Core i7 980X - and a quartet of PCIe expansion slots that facilitate multi-GPU CrossFire configurations. Three of the PCIe 2.0 slots will operate at x16, x8, x8, whilst the fourth hums along at x4. There's also a single PCI slot, and X58's half-a-dozen DDR3 memory slots.
USB 3.0 is of course built in, and Sapphire provides a couple of SATA 6Gbps connectors via a Marvel controller. Eight-channel audio is integrated, as is Bluetooth connectivity, and we're liking the look of the black-and-blue colour scheme.
For the overclockers out there, the board features dedicated start, rest and BIOS reset buttons, dedicated voltage read points and an LED status code indicator. A tweaked version of Sapphire's TriXX overclocking software will be available as part of the bundle, and the manufacturer tells us the board features "the same type of solid capacitors and the patented Sapphire Diamond Black chokes with coolers that have featured on some of Sapphire’s high end graphics cards".
It's a tasty-looking board, but we're far more intrigued by Sapphire's second upcoming Intel solution: the Pure Black P67 Hydra. Supporting Intel's new range of Sandy Bridge processors, the P67 Hydra is said to share "many of the features of the X58 model", but will also incorporate a Lucid Hydra chip to allow for mixed-vendor GPU configurations.
There's no firm release date for either board, but Sapphire claims both the X58 and P67 Hydra are "completed and in production".
