Fresh faces in the motherboard market are a rarity, so news of Sapphire’s intent to begin shipping boards worldwide caught my attention. The brand’s no stranger to the art, with models aplenty in China, but competing with bigwigs in the West is no small undertaking. However, having spent time testing Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7, I think we have a worthy addition to the fold on our hands.
Sapphire Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7
£160 / $189
Pros
- Solid build quality
- Good connectivity
- Intuitive BIOS
- Attractive price point
Cons
- Missing a few BIOS QoL features
- No Clear CMOS button
- Some PCIe clearance issues
Club386 may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase products through links on our site.
How we test and review products.
This is Sapphire’s flagship for the moment, with plans to launch Nitro+ X870EA WiFi PhantomLink later down the line. Retailing for £160 / $189, Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 falls right in line with other mainstream motherboards sporting AMD’s B850 chipset. Competition is fierce in this segment, and while this board isn’t quite a devastating disruptor it’s more than up to the task of holding its own.
Specifications
| Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 | |
|---|---|
| VRM | 12+2+1, 55A |
| RAM support | Slots: 4 Capacity: 256GB Speed: 8,000+MT/s |
| Onboard graphics | DisplayPort (x1) HDMI (x1) |
| PCIe expansion slots | PCIe 5.0 x16 (x1) PCIe 4.0 x4 (x1) PCIe 4.0 x2 (x1) |
| Audio | Realtek ALC897 |
| Storage | PCIe 5.0 x4 (x2) PCIe 4.0 x4 (x2) SATA III (x4) |
| Rear USB | 10Gb/s Type-A (x3) 10Gb/s Type-C (x1) 480Mb/s Type-A (x4) |
| Front USB | 5Gb/s Type-C (x1) 5Gb/s Type-A (x2) 480Mb/s Type-A (x2) |
| LAN | 2.5Gb RJ45 (x1) |
| Wireless | Bluetooth 5.3 Wi-Fi 7 |
Features
Sapphire equips Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 with a 12+2+1 power phase design, supporting up to 55A per phase. This configuration rests under suitably robust heatsinks that admirably keep temperatures in check.
There’s enough headroom here to engage in light overclocking, either manually or via PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive). While more phases are always welcome as CPU voltage increases, I’m confident 170W AM5 chips will run on this motherboard without issue.
Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 sports four DIMM slots, supporting up to 256GB (4x64GB) of DDR5 RAM. Tempting as larger capacities are, greater performance lies with dual-channel configurations, peaking at 8,000MT/s.
Naturally, the motherboard supports both AMD EXPO and A-XMP overclocking profiles to achieve maximum memory speeds. Alternatively, you can tinker with timings, clocks, and more via the BIOS.
Putting the ATX form factor to full use, Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 arrives with loads of room for add-in cards and M.2 storage. While I expect the majority to use just a few of these expansion slots, greater versatility is no bad thing.
You’ll find three full-size slots on the motherboard, each sporting a stylish metal coating, but you’ll want to plug in your graphics card into the topmost of the trio to benefit from PCIe Gen 5 x16 connectivity. The other two have PCIe Gen 4 x4 and Gen 4 x2 interfaces, respectively, with the former sharing bandwidth with one of the M.2 slots.
The primary expansion slot lies closest to the CPU socket, which created a small spot of bother for my test components. After installing my Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black and Crucial T700, I had to eject both from the build as my Nitro+ Radeon RX 7800 XT simply won’t fit otherwise.
This isn’t a problem unique to Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 but is a consequence of the board’s layout. You won’t have any issues fitting a more moderately-sized cooler, or an AIO, as I had no difficulty tagging in Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360. SSDs with built-in heatsinks will require more forethought, resulting in the removal of the drive’s cooler in my case.
Thankfully, Sapphire has provided ample cooling for every M.2 slot on the motherboard. Aluminium heatsinks cover every drive, complete with thermal pads. The PCIe Gen 5 slot even gets an additional ultra-thick pad, whose unusually large size still catches me off guard.
You’ll need a screwdriver handy to remove and reinstall the captive screws for each heatsink as you slot storage into the motherboard. That’s all you’ll need the tool for, though, as convenient clip mechanisms hold each SSD in place.
The board features separate headers for CPU fan and AIO pumps, along with three system fan connectors. There are also three 5V ARGB headers, and a single 12V. Suffice to say, you shouldn’t have any trouble setting up your case fans with Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7.
Before we turn attentions to USB connectivity, I’d like to give Sapphire kudos for including debug LEDs on this board. There’s nothing more frustrating than having zero feedback from your system during a boot cycle, particularly with AM5 memory training in the mix, making this feature a must-have in my view.
Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7’s rear I/O offers a good amount of connectivity to play with. The board’s fastest ports run at up to 10Gb/s via a single USB-C and three USB-A. You can easily identify them from the four 480Mb USB-A connectors, through Sapphire’s labelling and red colouring. Meanwhile, you can gain up to two additional 480Mb USB-A ports, as well as one 10Gb USB-A and USB-C, via front panel headers.
I’m happy to see a large BIOS Flashback LED to help track the progress of firmware updates. That said, there are no physical buttons to trigger the process and you’ll need to enter the BIOS to apply any future revisions. As ever, I’ll bemoan the lack of a clear CMOS button too, but the motherboard’s battery is at least easily accessible and achieves the same result.
Network connectivity is similarly solid on Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7. As the name of the board suggests, it comes with all the niceties of WiFi 7 including 6GHz connections. While Bluetooth 5.3 is a step behind the latest available revision, it’s an agreeable cutback in service of affordability.
Of course, you don’t have to cut the cord if you don’t want to as a 2.5Gb Ethernet is ready to receive any ever-reliable RJ45 cable you have on hand. I had no issues achieving the maximum 1Gb speed of my home network and broadband through either option.
For £160 / $189, Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 offers a feature-set that’s plenty competitive with alternatives around the same price point. While I don’t think WiFi 7 is much to scream and shout over, the motherboard doesn’t rest on such laurels by maintaining great connectivity elsewhere.
Even with the clearance issues I experienced, I conclude build quality to be of the same high standards I expect from Sapphire’s Nitro+ graphics cards. The mix of grey and white here will understandably prove too plain for some, but I’m personally all for minimalist, mature stylings on motherboards.
Firmware
A global motherboard debut comes part and parcel with a global firmware debut. Introducing ‘Sapphire Core’, it’s the BIOS you’ll find on all of the brand’s recently launched boards, including Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7.
This is a clean and intuitive suite that Sapphire’s clearly put due care and development time into. There is some room for improvement, but Core hits the scene with rock-solid foundations and design choices other manufacturers would do well to learn from.
Loading up into the BIOS, I’m happy to see it’s outputting at 1080p. Text elements are crisp, even on my 4K display, and the cool-blue stylings feels perfectly in tune with Sapphire’s aesthetic. This firmware is no eyesore, quite the opposite.
The ‘Dashboard’ tab serves as the ‘Easy Mode’ you’ll find on other BIOS. It hosts useful at-a-glance information about your system, such as as RAM speed, detected storage, as well as ‘Quick Set’ toggles for features including PBO, XMP/EXPO, and Resizable Bar.
Planted alongside these Quick Set options are three performance profiles: ‘Silence’, ‘Sapphire Default’, and ‘Performance’. It isn’t immediately clear what each preset does, save for enabling PBO in the case of Performance. However, I managed to work out that each shifts the severity of the system’s fan profile in a manner appropriate to their name.
Sapphire provides tooltips for everything else in the firmware, so the lack of information on these performance profiles stands out as odd. Normally I’d refer to the changelog that most other BIOSes provide before exiting, but no such functionality is present here either. Subsequent patches can address these problems, but they remain an annoyance in the current version.
Crafting a custom fan profile requires a little more effort than you’d expect, as you’ll need to carefully eyeball how each pip falls on the chart in lieu of tooltips. It’s also a crying shame that I can’t input temperature and speed values through typing numeric values, especially when there’s room for such an interface below the selection of five profiles.
It’s in the ‘Favourite’, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Overclock’ tabs that I come to appreciate the design of Core BIOS most. Instead of following the crowd with a long vertical list of options, Sapphire smartly makes use of the horizontal axis in populating each tab.
It’s a small change that makes a big difference in improving the usability of the firmware, particularly while using a mouse. I felt that this layout also helped me find particular settings at a glance more quickly than I would otherwise.
Core BIOS feels like the best of both worlds in many respects, organising all the advanced features enthusiasts will want into a clean, simple interface that won’t intimidate newcomers. Apply a few quality-of-life tweaks, with the BIOS changelog being top priority, and Sapphire has some first-rate firmware on its hands.
Performance
Test bench components include Ryzen 9 9900X, Radeon RX 7800 XT, Crucial T700 2TB, Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360, be quiet! Dark Power 13 1,000W and 32GB (2x16GB) of Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6,400 RAM. While I do have a Radeon RX 9070 XT at my disposal, I’ve stuck with RX 7800 XT to ensure comparable results to prior testing.
| Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 | MEG X870E Godlike | |
|---|---|---|
| AIDA Read | 75,061MB/s | 77,578MB/s |
| AIDA Write | 82,273MB/s | 83,586MB/s |
| AIDA Copy | 71,265MB/s | 72,406MB/s |
| AIDA Latency | 81.5ns | 82.5ns |
| Cinebench 2024 1T | 135pts | 137pts |
| Cinebench 2024 MT | 1,819pts | 1,811pts |
| PCMark 10 | 10,851pts | 10,903pts |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 19,014pts | 19,345pts |
| 3DMark Steel Nomad | 4,118pts | 4,188pts |
| CrystalDiskMark seq. read | 12,349MB/s | 12,397MB/s |
| CrystalDiskMark seq. write | 11,834MB/s | 11,809MB/s |
| Cyberpunk 2077 (Min. / Avg.) | 67fps / 79fps | 66fps / 77fps |
| FFXIV: Dawntrail (Min. / Avg.) | 76fps / 185fps | 84fps / 188fps |
| VRM temperature | 52°C | 41°C |
| Power consumption (Idle / Load) | 67W / 247W | 98W / 265W |
It may seem ridiculous to compare Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7, a budget motherboard, to the ultra-premium flagship that is MEG X870E Godlike. However, doing so reveals there’s actually very little between these two boards when it comes to stock performance.
While CPU, GPU, and RAM performance are broadly comparable on each board, there is a noticeable difference in VRM temperatures. Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 runs 11°C hotter on account of understandably leaner heatsinks, yet it’s still miles away from proving a point of concern.
Shifting from ‘Standard’ to ‘Performance’ is as close as Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 gets to a one-click overclock. Running Cinebench 2024, PBO and more-aggressive fan curve in tow, for example, sees small increases to single-core and multi-core results.
More specifically, my Ryzen 9 9900X enjoys a 1% boost to its single-core score (137 vs. 135pts). Meanwhile multi-core gains are meagre (1819 vs. 1821), to the point of being within margin of error.
Conclusion
Sapphire is a tour de force in the Radeon graphics card market, and I can clearly see much of the brand’s design expertise in this motherboard. These similarities are more than skin deep, of course, as Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 pairs familiar classy stylings with a smartly curated feature-set that provides great value for money.
I’m keen to see Sapphire build on Core BIOS through new revisions, giving the firmware’s intuitive design and attractive aesthetics all the features it deserves. With a few patches, both the suite and motherboard will easy turn from great to excellent in my eyes.
Even with these wishes in hand, I still heartily recommend considering Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 for your next system. If nothing else, this board has firmly whet my appetite for other Sapphire SKUs, those of an X870(E) flavour and beyond.
