This board is a good choice for a Home Theatre PC or a NetTop and can even be overclocked a little, but don't expect to much from that.

The features of this mobo are of course limited because of the Mini ITX form factor, but nevertheless it has Gigabit LAN, 5.1 surround sound, digital out over HDMI or the internal SPDIF connector, 10 USB ports, 4 SATA II ports with RAID support and video outputs for VGA, DVI-D or HDMI. This board offers horrible overclocking options, like clearing the CMOS after every failed overclock. Still it has a good performance and a low power consumption, but it would be desirable, if Sapphire would update the BIOS with more settings.

IGP Graphics:

Unfortunately in spite of current 3DMark patches and DLL updates it was not possible to run the HD 4200 internal graphics stable with the Phenom II X3 710 used in the test, because of that benchmark values could only be measured with a discrete video card.

The X3 710 has a 95W TDP desingn, according to Sapphire CPUs up to 65 Watts are supported without restrictions, whereby according to the CPU support list processors up to 125W and/or 95W TDP are applicable with improvement of the cooling.

Overclocking:

It was possible to overclock this mobo up to 262 MHz BCLK, it was necessary to set the Clear CMOS Jumper after a failed overclock. It was not possible to lower the BCLK below 200 MHz, so underclocking the processor is not possible.

Benchmarks:

SiSoftware Sandra 2010c, 3DMark Vantage, 3D Mark 2006, 3D Mark 2003.

Compared To:

This Mini ITX board was not compared to another board in the benches.

Test Setup:

• CPU : AMD Phenom II X3 710
• Graphics Card : Gigabyte GV-N250OC-1GI Nvidia GTS250
• Graphics Card : Sapphire HD4870 512MB ATI Radeon HD4870
• RAM : 2x 2048MB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3-1333MHz