Sapphire B850A Nitro+ WiFi7 Motherboard Preview
B850A Up Close
B850A Up Close
It’s no secret that we like the subtle, but consistent, logo Sapphire uses for its Nitro products. Consistent branding is an underrated element in the hardware world.
One of the truisms of the modern world is that there are only a limited number of factories. If you’ll forgive us getting a little parochial, Tesco, Morrison, Sainsbury, ASDA etc all have their own brand products. But they definitely don’t all have factories for those products. It’s badge engineering. Heinz make it, and adjust for each label. Similarly we think Sapphire probably aren’t making their own motherboards. We can’t tell who is behind it though. Whomever it is has done an excellent job. It looks fantastic.
Beneath the heatsinks we find the storage. Split between 1 PCIe Gen 5 and 2 Gen 4. The amount of M.2 slots is one of the only things that you can use to tell B850 and X870E motherboards apart.
We remember when a separate trace for the audio was worthy of highlighting. It’s still a very cool feature and pretty much saw the end of add-on sound cards. It is on every PCB we see.
A tell-tale is often the heatsink design on the VRMs, but even here we can’t spot the B850A Nitro+s roots. A clear CPU cover is unique to this as far as we can recall. Under here we have a Richtek RT3678 controller and AOS AOZ5510QI DrMos. The 12+2+1 phase power design has 55A, enough for any of the AMD Ryzen processors.
