Sapphire Pure Black 990FX Review @ OCC

The Sapphire Pure Black 990FX is a beautifully crafted motherboard with a great layout and is made for the high end enthusiast who wants to stack up two or three big GPUs and and clock their CPU to maximum frequency. It is full of top notch solid capacitors, ferrite 'Diamond' chokes and a long row of transducers with 8+2+2 phase power delivery. With Bluetooth and dual LAN in the back, and heat sinks that look like they could cap off Chernobyl on the front, this really great board is missing one crucial feature to truly fulfill its intended purpose of being an overclock powerhouse. It needs Load Line Calibration or Control. While I was able to obtain a respectable overclock on the FX-8150 of 4.6GHz, the silicon will be stable at 5.0GHz on a board with LLC. It is a feature that I cannot explain the absence of on high end enthusiast boards today.