Over the years, SAPPHIRE (who we’ve reviewed a ton of their kit) has been a well known name in the AMD GPU manufacturing business to those of us living in the United States. In fact, until my visit with them at Computex a couple years back, I had no idea they were also in the motherboard business, albeit limited to selling into the China market. This year, at Computex 2025, they pulled a rabbit out of their hat with some lowkey good news.
That is about to change as they are launching their motherboards on a worldwide basis this year, including the US market. One of the motherboards they were showcasing (the SAPPHIRE X870EA NITRO+ WiFi PhantomLink Edition) was sporting a BTF connector that was, until that moment, proprietary to ASUS products.
To go along with it, they also had a RX 9070 XT NITRO+ PhantomLink (see our review of the standard SAPPHIRE RX 9070 XT NITRO+ here) that was sporting a BTF connector.
We looked a bit closer at it and found that the BTF peg was removable so you could alternatively power the card using a 12HVPWR cable which had a connector hiding behind the backplate panel. The BTF removability is something that ASUS had just debuted a few days prior with its 50 Series BTF launch. Of note, this is also the first AMD card we’ve seen with a 12HVPWR connector instead of a duo to trio of 8-pin PCIe sockets.
Summing it up, the expansion of the BTF connector to SAPPHIRE kit notches a huge win for ASUS that’s going up against several other back connector/hidden wire standards that are being promogulated by its competition, bringing it a single step ahead of Intel’s ill-fated BTX attempt. We’re looking forward to seeing SAPPHIRE joining the fray in the US motherboard market and hope to have their products on our test bench as soon as possible (which, may be fairly soon).