Sapphire Pure Black X79n

Vudue Priest

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Dec 31, 2013
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Long story short, I bought into the x79 Xeon gold rush. My Intel DX79TO just crapped out, and in a rush I miraculously won an fleabay auction on a Sapphire Pure Black x79n for a fantastic price.

Did a quick search and saw the reviews were pretty favorable, but all of those were from 2012. Anyone on here have current experience with this main board? Due to conflicting information, I didn't find out till it was too late that it is not SLI ready and I use dual 770s... Anyone get different SLI to work on with hyperSLI or different SLI?

This seems to only really have been prevelent in Europe and Russia... Most of the hits on Google are from non English forums. I also see that the CPU compatibility list is mostly i7 extremes, although I have seen E5-2670, which I'm using, pop up in some of the forum posts (mostly in cyrillics). Any info or insight is greatly appreciated.

Worst case scenario I have to ditch my cards in favor of AMD (notime what I want) or I get to resell this board and try to find another that works with my CPU.

Thanks
 

Vudue Priest

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Dec 31, 2013
248
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10,710
Since I got no hits here, seems to be a much more common theme on Tom's hardware these days, I thought I'd post for the hell of it.

The board is fantastic and I am much happier than I was with the Intel. Only notable dislikes have to do with the BIOS. The options for changing memory timings is extremely limited. XMP on the Intel board didn't mind that I had mixed sets of 2400mhz memory, where as the Sapphire does and caps me at 1600. Unfortunately the BIOS doesn't allow manually setting the clocks per dimm, so I will have to experiment with finding common settings for the two memory types and see if I can force 2400mhz. The lack of SLI was not fixed by different SLI but that's seems to be more of a Windows issue with applying the patched drivers.

The pcie slots are too close together for dual slot cards. The second slot is covered effectively only giving the user 2 of the 3 16x slots. If a second card occupies the third slot two things happen, first this is that I had to unplug my front panel audio connector as it prevents the card from being seated. The second is that x79 chooser and fn200 chip have a fan cooler that gets clocked by running a second card. If using a blower style GPU, the chooser cooler has nowhere to vent. Custom cooler cards might not have this issue.

All in all a fantastic board choice for x79 chips.