Layout and Contents:

First up, let's take a look at the box contents.  The Sapphire PURE comes with a CD, two black SATA cables, an I/O shield, Molex to SATA power cable, IDE data cable, and a PCI-e Switch Card. 

The Sapphire PURE Installation CD includes all the necessary drivers, as well as AMD OverDrive, Cool and Quiet, BIOS Flash Tool, ImageIt3, PCCillin, and ProMagic Plus recovery software.

Now, for that interesting little device called the "Switch Card".  When I first saw it, I was rather confused, as I had not seen a similar card before.  Turns out, the purpose of the card is to switch the Crossfire configuration from 8x-8x to a single 16x lane by inserting the card into the secondary PCI-e x16 slot.  Most motherboards accomplish this through a BIOS option, however Sapphire has opted for this small PCB to do the trick.

It was nice of Sapphire to send me a board in my favorite color, blue.  The layout of the board is very similar to the other 790GX boards I have played with, with some notable exceptions, which we shall cover later.  The front panel header sits along the edge on the bottom left of the picture.  There are six SATA connectors that sit adjacent to the southbridge, of which two may be obstructed when a large GPU is installed.

Above is a close-up of the onboard Power and Reset switches, adjacent to another fan header.  The presence of these switches is a feature that does not exist on more expensive 790GX boards. 

Our first closeup brings us to the DRAM socket area.  On the edge of the board, we have our 24-pin power connector, IDE drive connector, and floppy connector.  Adjacent to the CPU socket lies the CPU fan power connector. 

In the above pic, we get another look at the socket, as well as the heatsinks that cover the northbridge and power MOSFETs.  We can also see one of the auxiliary fan connectors as well. 

The PCI slot configuration is laid out such that there are two PCI-e x1 slots in between the two PCI-e x16 slots.  Underneath, there are two legacy PCI slots.  The CMOS battery sits between the two PCI slots, and a CMOS reset jumper, as well as a push-button reset switch sit adjacent.  Along the bottom edge of the board sit all of the headers for various ports, including Audio, COM, and USB ports. 

The I/O area of the Sapphire PURE includes PS/2, HDMI, DVI, and Ethernet, as well as four USB ports and the 8-channel audio connections. 

A nice touch to the Sapphire PURE is not only the POST code display, but the fact that after POST completes, the display then switches to showing CPU temperature.  Quite handy.