Sapphire Nitro+ X870EA WiFi PhantomLink motherboard set to launch soon

The board was spotted at a retailer listing alongside the X870A PURE.

Sapphire’s Nitro+ X870EA WiFi PhantomLink motherboard has now been spotted at retailers, confirming its market positioning. The board appeared with a price of 1382 PLN in Poland, which converts to around 281 USD once Poland’s 23% VAT is excluded.

That puts Sapphire’s first X870E entry above what could be considered entry-level (the cheapest X870E boards cost around $240). Still, the price seems to be attractive given it features a very interesting technology not seen on any motherboard yet except for ASUS, who came up with this idea.

Source: Bit-IT.pl

This idea is called the GC-HPWR connector, a PCIe side power connector for graphics cards. Sapphire calls this a PhantomLink support with the GC-HPWR connector, making it compatible with ASUS BTF-ready graphics cards. Sapphire will also have its own NITRO+ RX 9070 XT card which presumably launches alongside this board. This allows the GPU to draw power directly from the motherboard without a traditional cable, giving a cleaner build layout.

Source: Club386

The Nitro+ X870EA WiFi PhantomLink is an ATX board designed for Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 processors. It offers four DDR5 slots with up to 256GB capacity, PCIe 5.0 graphics support, dual PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, and a full complement of PCIe 4.0 and SATA storage. Networking features include 5GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4, while audio is powered by a Realtek ALC897 codec.

Sapphire is clearly positioning the Nitro+ X870EA WiFi PhantomLink as a premium choice for Ryzen-based systems rather than trying to compete in the entry-level space. The only issue is that Sapphire has no ‘name’ in the motherboard business yet, their X870A PURE and this X870AE NITRO+ boards will be, in fact, the very first high-end AM5 boards from this brand launching globally.

Source: Buy-it