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The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra arrives in a stylish box with naming and specifications listed on the front.
As we experienced with their Pure Black X58 board, the bundle is spartan, with only sata cables, a software CD, manual and backplate included. The manual is a multi language affair and doesn't offer much detailed information on the product and settings. It is well written however which is refreshing.
The Sapphire Pure Black P67 uses high quality Japanese solid capacitors and high performance MOFSET's and we like the simple yet effective blue and black colour scheme. There is plenty of room around the CPU socket for the majority of third party coolers we have used. Obviously this is a slot 1155 motherboard, so LGA1156 processors are not compatible.
The board is a 305mm x 244mm ATX factor design.
The P67 Hydra features eight SATA connectors. Four are coloured red, which are 6GBps ports, two of which are powered by the P67 chipset and two from a Marvell 88SE9128 controller chip. A further three black SATA ports offer 3GBps speeds. The eight port is an eSATA connector which is on the rear I/O panel.
Around the CPU socket, Sapphire have included a large heatsink to help cool the components, this is wedged between the CPU socket and the rear I/O panel, yet is far enough away to not affect fitting of oversized coolers.
The board includes a Lucid Hydra LT24102 chip which allows for cross vendor multi GPU configurations. Sapphire will obviously have problems getting an Nvidia SLI license, which is why the Pure Black X58 was sold without support. This is a smart way to work around SLI licensing problems and we will look at the support and performance later in the review.
The first PCI E slot is 16x, slot 2 and 3 are 8x and the last one is 4x.
There are a total of 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 3.0 ports available. There is also Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and an older PS2 connector offered. Integrated BlueBooth 2.1 is included, as well as eight channel audio and optical audio output, which is provided by the RealTek ALC892 codec.
The board supports up to 16GB of memory via 4GB memory sticks populated in the four slots. Sapphire say that up to 1,600mhz memory is supported, but we will try 2,000mhz memory later to see how far we can push it.
