This top graphics card maker could now disrupt the PC gaming motherboard world

A new name could soon be seen among the usual Asus, ASRock, MSI, and Gigabyte motherboards outside China, as it looks as though another well-established gaming hardware firm is about to enter the fray. That company is Sapphire, which has just teased an image on social media that shows part of a Sapphire motherboard with the company's Nitro+ branding, which the company uses for its high-end AMD Radeon graphics cards.

"We've got something exciting coming up soon!" says the accompanying caption, and I, for one, would love to see our best gaming motherboard buying guide spiced up with some more competition. I've reviewed a number of Sapphire graphics cards over the years, and the Nitro+ cards in particular have consistently offered superb build quality, great looks, decent cooling, and quiet operation. Sapphire has been making motherboards for a long time, but they're usually only available in China.

That looks as though it could be set to change with this new announcement, with tech leaker momomo_us spotting that several motherboards have already been added to the worldwide Sapphire website, with a bunch of them already listed (though out of stock) on Australian retailer MWave. Most of the models use Sapphire's standard or Pulse branding, but there's also a micro-ATX board clad in the Nitro+ livery, which uses AMD's B850 chipset.

The Sapphire Nitro+ B850M WiFi, based on AMD's mid-range B850 chipset for its Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series CPUs, has been out in China for a while now, but this is the first hint we've seen of a worldwide launch. There's full support for the latest PCIe 5.0 drives on our guide to buying the best gaming SSD, including a hefty heatsink plate, as well as a 16x PCIe 5.0 slot that can handle any of the cards on our best GPU guide, plus an extra 4x PCIe 4.0 slot for another expansion card.

You also get a full lineup of four DDR5 memory slots, 2.5Gbps Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6 support, and eight USB ports, including a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port for attaching a high-speed SSD. It's not a ground-breaking spec by any means, but it's a really neat-looking board with a classy design - it's also just refreshing to see another player potentially entering the arena in the worldwide motherboard market, and with a product that's specifically targeted at gamers.

We'll have to watch this space and see whether Sapphire does make this move, but it would be great to see some more competition here - I miss the days when firms such as Abit, AOpen, DFI, and Biostar regularly made new motherboards for the US, EU, and UK markets, plus more competition is always good for gamers when it comes to driving down prices. As an AMD-exclusive partner in the graphics card world, however, I'm expecting Sapphire to stick to AMD motherboard chipsets, rather than venturing into Intel's territory.

This new board would make an ideal platform for an affordable mini gaming PC, and you can check out our guide to buying the best gaming CPU to find a good chip to put in it - the new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D would be a prime contender for a gaming rig.

Would you like to see a new gaming motherboard contender in your part of the world? Let us know your thoughts in our community Discord channel.