Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard

Sapphire, one of AMD's biggest partners in the graphics card business, has also been back in the motherboard game for a while now after a prolonged absence.

The company's latest board, the Pure Platinum A75, is built around AMD's latest Lynx platform for the A series of APUs (AMD's term for a chipset combining the main processor and graphics processor), in particular the A75 (Hudson D3) chipset.

The Lynx platform has caused quite a stir since its arrival; it offers some proper performance at long last for a computer with integrated graphics, with DirectX 11 support as well.

It's a well-laid-out board with plenty of room around the major components and it supports four DDR3 DIMM memory slots, a single PCI-Express x16 graphics slot, a pair of x1 PCI-Express slots, a single x4 PCI-Express slot and a finally a pair good old-fashioned PCI slots.

The surprising addition is to be found under the graphics card slot, in the shape of a Mini PCI-Express slot that can be used to house a TV tuner or wireless network adapter card.

There are five Sata 6Gbits/sec ports, four of which are edge-mounted at 90 degrees (which aids tidy cable runs) while the remaining port is vertically mounted, which makes it easier to plug in a Sata optical drive. In fact, if you are using an old optical drive with an ATA (IDE) interface it's time for an upgrade – this board doesn't have any ATA ports.

Not only does the Pure Platinum A75 offer decent integrated graphics performance but by adding a cheapish dedicated graphics card such as an AMD HD6670 you can get something AMD calls ‘dual graphics' for even better graphics performance.

When we tested it with Futuremark's 3DMark 11 Performance test at a 720p resolution (1,280 by 720 pixels) the integrated graphics gave a score of 787, while using a HD6670 card on its own gave a score of 1,721. Using the dual graphics gave a much-improved score of 2,160.

We also tried the built-in Dark Tower benchmarking map in the game Just Cause 2, at a 1080p resolution with 4x anti-aliasing filtering (1,920x1,080 pixels). That gave a score of 11.8 frames per second (fps) with integrated graphics, 27.2fps with the dedicated card and 35.1fps using dual graphics.

Although the integrated scores might not look all that impressive, it is running a DirectX11 game, something that Intel's integrated Sandy Bridge graphics doesn't even support.

To add value to the board Sapphire has included a coupon for the game Dirt 3 to allow users to download it from Steam, and a dual-port USB 3 housing for the front of your computer's case.