Sapphire may not be best known for its mainboard business but that doesn't stop them from coming up with their own offers, like AMD 790FX boards for example. On November 19th when AMD will officially release the Spider platform you can expect loads of manufacturers to have boards powered by the AMD 790FX, 790X and 770 chipsets and Sapphire will be one of them. The highest-end Phenom-ready product from Sapphire will be the 790FX-powered CrossFireX PC-AM2RD790.

The upcoming motherboard will support both AM2 and AM2+ CPUs, will have DDR2-1066 support, six SATA 3.0Gbps ports and 'only' three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots thus making it incapable off Quad-Crossfire setups (but two/three cards should work just fine).

For the AM2RD790 Sapphire didn't touch any copper piece and has equipped the board with an aluminum cooling system, complete with the ever-popular heatpipes. The backplate of Sapphire's board features two Gigabit Ethernet ports and six lovely USB 2.0 ports but interestingly-enough, no audio connectors which will probably me found on a separate PCI plate. Sapphire's board is now ready (they'll just have to erase the "LanParty") and will become available by the end of the month.