Final Thoughts on the Sapphire NITRO+ B850A WIFI 7 Motherboard
Being that this is the first motherboard I’ve taken a look at from Sapphire I am pretty impressed. From the design to the feature-set, and even the BIOS Sapphire has done a great job here. As far as the design goes I think this board looks great. The black PCB with the great and silver accents is going to give you a great look and of course this board is going to match up perfectly with Sapphire’s NITRO+ graphics cards. There is no RGB lighting though, but of course you do have the headers if you wanted to add some lighting to your build.
For a B850 motherboard you are getting a pretty solid feature-set here. The biggest thing is that you are going to get PCI-Express 5.0 on your graphics and that top M.2 slot, with a total of three M.2 slots (the second two are PCIe 4.0). You also of course have WiFi 7, 2.5G LAN, and Type-C connectivity, but that is only USB 3.2 gen 2, not 2×2 or USB4. I am also not the biggest fan of the M.2 placement, typically on a lot of boards we have access to our top M.2 slot without having to remove out graphics card, but you’ll have to remove your graphics card to access your Gen5 slot.
Another thing I really liked, as was frankly surprised by was the BIOS. Sapphire’s Core BIOS is one of the best designed BIOS’s that I’ve seen in a while. While I would say that there are not as many settings as you find in other BIOS’s it is thoughtfully designed and everything is really easy to find. I would hope Sapphire continues to improve on this BIOS and push out regular updates.
If you are looking to build a more budget-friendly Ryzen-based system the Sapphire NITRO+ B850A WIFI 7 is going to be a solid choice overall, especially at the price of $189.99. I would really love to see Sapphire come out with an X870 / X870E board as well. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Sapphire NITRO+ B850A WIFI 7 Motherboard an 8 out of 10 score!
Pros:
– Price
– Gen5 support on both the graphics and storage
– Great BIOS
– 3 M.2 slots
– WiFi 7 connectivity
Cons:
– No USB 3.2 gen 2×2 or USB4
– Have to remove graphics card to access M.2 slots
– A lot less ease of use features compared to other boards
