Sapphire is said to be muscling into the motherboard market. Although Sapphire is usually associated with discrete Radeons, the company has been in the motherboard market for a few years. We reviewed a Sapphire Brazos ITX board a couple of years ago, but so far Sapphire shied away from the socketed motherboard market – it just has a few SKUs here and there.

This may be about to change, according to Digitimes. Sapphire is said to be in the midst of a motherboard push and it is aiming to seize market share from second-tier motherboard makers like ASRock, ECS and MSI. Sapphire does not appear to be willing to lock horns with first-tier players like Asus and Gigabyte. 

It is worth noting that Sapphire remains the biggest AMD AIB partner on the globe. It is said to have a 40 percent market share in the Radeon space and the share appears to be growing.

However, this does not mean that Sapphire is an AMD-exclusive outfit when it comes to motherboards. In fact, it currently has more motherboard SKUs for Intel Socket 1155 and Socket 1150 processors than AMD FM2 and AM3+ platforms.

Sapphire wants to outpace Biostar and ASRock next year, creeping up on MSI in the process.