Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G

Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G review

Workhorse motherboards aimed at embedded and commercial applications tend not to make fine fillies in the context of home PCs. With that in mind, what chance has the Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G in the Mini-ITX motherboard stakes? Despite being categorised as an industrial motherboard – the marketing bumpf speaks of information kiosks and digital signage, not games and movies – the Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G does seem to tick all the boxes required for a compact home cinema system. The AMD 785G chipset is certainly multimedia friendly and theoretically works with all the latest AMD CPUs including the top six-core Thuban chips. Sapphire has even found space for a pukka PCI-e x16 port on this vanishingly small Mini-ITX board. A high performance AMD-based alternative to Mini-ITX boards such as Zotac's H55-ITX WiFi is therefore not out of the question. But the real story of the Sapphire IPC-AM3DD785G's suitability for home systems only begins when you fire it up. Usability is where industrial PCs tend to fall flat. It's therefore not exactly shocking to find the Sapphire IPCAM3DD785G doesn't always make life easy for the end user. A good example of this is the BIOS updating routine.