Sapphire Releasing New Motherboards?

So just viewed a KitGuru Computex video and Leo was at the Sapphire booth, they are releasing some new AM5 motherboards.

Thoughts ?

Sapphire entering the motherboard game is interesting seeing as they’ve mostly stuck to AMD exclusive cards before.

As with all products I will wait and see on the reviews, but given the general decent quality of the Radeon products, I am interested in checking them out. :slight_smile:

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I can get Sapphire boards through an importer but, seeing they’re only described in Chinese on Sapphire’s website and are absent from other languages’ navigation menus, I have questions about what support would be like outside of China. For the boards I’ve checked manuals are absent from the download section and Sapphire doesn’t specify whether M2_2 and the 4.0 x4 slot are on CPU or chipset lanes. AGESA versions aren’t indicated for BIOS updates and the BIOS updates I’ve tried to download fail with too many redirects. From the website images it also looks like there’s some surprisingly basic misses like missing fan channel labels in the silkscreen.

Not a fan of the armor. A single plate for both M.2s and the chipset means complicated adjustments to get the levels right for good contact on both drives and requires machining a replacement plate if you need better heatsinking. Putting M2_1 directly below dGPU exhaust is thermally about the worst position for an M.2 anyways.

So non-starter for me for now, partly because I need to be able to archive an English manual so someone else can work on the build if I change jobs. Sapphire’s currently only making mATX and pretty much everything I build is ATX, so doesn’t really matter.

Almost if Sapphire, is looking to fill an enthusiasts void [EVGA departure]

The motherboard market is pretty crowded IMHO. Unless you’re filling a hole, I don’t get it.
If you’re bringing post codes, lane sharing, x8 slots, and no rgb to motherboards for $200-250, then great, i’m on board.
If you’re bringing a gc-hpwr connector and charging >= $500 (i’m just speculating on the price) just to sell your special connector GPUs, then go away.
Side note: I don’t get the gc-hpwr connector here. What’s the point when just an inch away on the mobo PCB they put the 12VHPWR connector? Is it simply a confluence of making an unsightly cable (not to me) a little less unsightly and reducing the bend for those putting the GPU that close to the case side? At least Asus put in 8 pin connectors and put them on the back side of the PCB.

Sapphire has been making motherboards for industrial/embedded for a while, and to be fair I’ve seen articles about other AM5 boards they made a year ago.

imho they are not targeting the West, a little like Biostar that seems to still exist and still make boards but nobody seems to care outside of asia