Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra Motherboard (PB-CI7S42P67) Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra3. The Bios, hardware configuration and overclocking4. Testing Methodology5. Lucid Hydra Configuration6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra7. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit8. Synthetic: Aida 649. Synthetic: PCMark Vantage10. Synthetic: CrystalMark & HDTach11. Real World: BluRay Playback with Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra12. Real World: Flash HD Performance13. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink Media Espresso14. Real World: File Copying with Kingston HyperX Max 3.015. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark V2.016. Gaming 1 Screen: Alien V Predator17. Gaming 1 screen: Far Cry 218. Gaming 1 Screen: Resident Evil 519. Gaming 1 screen: Lost Planet 220. Gaming 3 screen: Colin McRae Dirt 2 @ 5760x108021. Gaming 3 screen: Crysis Warhead @ 5760x108022. Gaming 3 screen: F1 2010 @ 5760x108023. CrossfireX: Unigine Heaven Benchmark24. CrossfireX: 3dMark Vantage25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

Sapphire are probably AMD's largest and longest term partner, producing the finest video cards for the discerning enthusiast audience. In recent years they have been expanding their product portfolio into other categories, such as power supplies and even all in one high definition media computers.

KitGuru recently reviewed their latest Pure Black X58 motherboard which was not only exceptionally well built, but which offered massive overclocking potential. Today we are looking at their unique take on Sandybridge, with their Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard. With a retail price of around £199.99 in the UK is this a board that you should be shortlisting for your next upgrade?

The specifications are impressive. Sapphire are using a 6+2+3 phase power design for the CPU core, CPU VTT and memory with support for up to 16GB of DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1,600mhz. They have also included voltage measure points, dedicated power and reset buttons along with a diagnostic LED and switchable dual BIOS configuration.

Specification
CPU	Support Intel LGA1155: Intel Core i7 /i5 / i3 series processors
Chipset	Intel® P67 Express Chipset
BIOS	AMI BIOS, 16Mb Flash ROM
Memory	2 Channel DDR3 Technology 4 slots 240-pin DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600+ non-ECC ,un-buffered memory 16 GB Max.
Expansion Slots	4 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots 2 x 32-bit PCI slots
Storage	7 x Serial ATA III 6Gb/s connectors Supports HDDs with RAID 0, 1,5,10 functions
Audio	Realtek ALC892 HD Audio CODEC with 8-Channel
Ethernet LAN	Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN
Rear Panel I / O	8 x USB 2.0 port 2 x USB 3.0 port 1 x 1394a port 1 x SPDIF Coaxial OUT 1 x Audio I / O ports 1 x SPDIF Optical Out 1 x Supporting Bluetooth® 2.1 + EDR by Atheros AR3011 1 x e-SATA port PS/2 KB/MS combo port
Internal I / O	2 x USB 2.0 headers CPU 4 pin PWM Fan connectors 3 Pin Chassis Fan connectors 24-pin ATX Power connector 8-pin ATX 12V Power connector Control (Front) panel headers SPDIF In/out header 1 x 1394a headers
Special Features	Voltage measure PAD Power on Button with Power LED Reset Button with HDD access LED Clear CMOS button Diagnostic LED with CPU temperature monitor Dual BIOS with select Jumpers or switch 100% Japanese Solid Capacitor
Form Factor	ATX, Size 12″ x 9.6″
OS support	Windows Vista (32/64) bit Windows 7 (32/64) bit

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.

Sapphire are using an American Megatrends bios, which is a no frills configuration, although it does offer full voltage and clock adjustments. Compared to some of the other P67 bioses it does look rather pedestrian.

We are using an Intel Core i7 2600k processor which runs at a default clock speed of 3.4ghz.

We are using an Intel Core i7 2600k for our review today. Kitguru has already covered this processor at launch day and we also managed to push it to 5.1ghz on an Intel motherboard – these processors overclock very easily and don't demand massive levels of voltage either.

Overclocking the 2600k to 4.8ghz was straightforward., simply by increasing the voltage to 1.47v and adjusting the CPU VTT to 1.15v we achieved complete stability. We are using a relatively modest cooler for this system build (CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus), so with a higher end model such as the Noctua NH D14, 5ghz might be possible.

Even though Sapphire rate the board as supporting memory to 1600mhz, we used 2ghz ADATA memory which worked fine. We did have to manually select the XMP profile however otherwise it defaulted to 1333mhz.

Processor: Intel Core i7 2600K
Memory: ADATA 2ghz gaming memory (2x4GB)
Motherboard: Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200W
Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
Chassis: Antec Twelve Hundred
Hard Drive: Corsair Force F40 40GB SSD
Graphics cards: Sapphire HD 6970×3, GTX460 OCx2, GTX580.

Comparison systems:

Intel Core i5-2500k System:
Processor: Core i5-2500k
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600mhz
Power Supply: Antec High Current Pro 850W
Motherboard: ASRock P67 Extreme4
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Thermal Paste: Noctua NT H1
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Graphics: Gigabyte GTX460 OC
Drive: Intel X25-M SSD (160GB)
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit

Intel Core i5-655k System:
Processor: Intel Core i5 655k
Memory: Kingston 4GB DDR3 1600mhz
Motherboard: AsRock P55 Deluxe 3
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD6850
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 750W
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Drive: Kingston 128GB SSD

Intel Core i5-760 System:
Processor: Intel Core i5 760
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 4GB 1600mhz
Motherboard: AsRock P55 Extreme4
Graphics Card: AMD HD6870
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 750W
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Drive: Kingston 128GB SSD

Intel Core i7 950 System
Processor: Intel Core i7 950
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 6GB 1600mhz
Motherboard: AsRock X58 Extreme6
Graphics Card: AMD HD6850
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 750W
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Drive: Kingston 128GB SSD

Software:
Windows 7 64 Bit Enterprise Edition
Catalyst 11.2
ForceWare 266.66
Aida 64
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
Fraps Professional
SiSoft Sandra
CPUz
GPUz
CPUID Hardware Monitor Professional
Cinebench R11.5 64 bit
CyberLink PowerDvd 10 Ultra
Cyberlink Media Espresso
CrystalMark
HDTach
HQV Benchmark V 2.0
PCMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage
Unigine Heaven Benchmark

Games:
Alien V Predator
Far Cry 2
Resident Evil 5
Lost Planet 2
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Crysis Warhead
F1 2010

KitGuru uses multiple runs to ensure that accurate results are published.

Before we get into the main testing section of the review, one of the primary selling points of the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra is that you can also pair up two nVidia graphics cards and can even use an AMD and Nvidia graphics card in a mixed configuration.

This is a daunting task for any company.

The Lucid chip has to allow for GPU load balancing in the same manner as Crossfire and SLi but even across mixed platforms.

Load balancing demands computational power and the Hydra chip contains a RISC core based on the Tensilica Diamond Architecture.

In the real world however things didn't go smoothly for us and we would experience random hard locks, system crashes and freezing when loading up any 3D title. This was with two nVidia GTX460's in the system and we spent many hours playing with settings and configurations. I have the hair loss to prove it.

The driver installed on the Sapphire software CD is actually out of date, so we updated to the latest version on the lucidlogix driver page – Version 1.7.104a.

This latest driver offers support for 3DMark 11 and has many bug fixes implemented.

Above, 3DMark Vantage running with two GTX 460's installed. We also tried a Sapphire HD6850 and an eVGA GTX460 paired. The correct way for installation is to install the two video card drivers first in Windows 7, then to install the LucidLogix driver last. If you don't follow this procedure the system will sometimes hang on start up or not work at all. The platform relies on game profiles and driver optimisations to allow the titles to work.

• X-Mode: A Radeon 4000 or newer and GeForce series G90/G200 graphics card
• N mode: Two GeForce series G90/G200 graphics cards
• R mode: Two Radeon 4000 or newer graphics cards

Sadly, we couldn't get a HD6850 and a GTX460 to play ball, nor a GTS450 and HD5770, or any other combination of AMD and Nvidia graphics card we have available. We had a few configurations work for a few minutes, then crash shortly afterward.

• 3DMark11 support
• NVIDIA GTX570 GPU support
• ATI HD69xx support
• Nvidia WHQL Driver 263.09 issues fixed
• ATI WHQL driver 10.12 support
• Batman: Arkham Asylum bug fixed
• Optimization Indicator bar feature added
• GUI new look and features
• Passmark test tool on Vista – fixed
• Devil May Cry 4 benchmark issue fixed
• ALT+TAB issues fixed
• GTS250 + HD5670 configuration supported

The Lucid drivers page does indicate that all Nvidia and ATI drivers should work, but in the list above it says 263.09 ‘issues fixed' and 10.12 driver is supported (December 2010). We tried a clean system install with these older drivers and didn't experience any improved stability. Frequently games and synthetic benchmarks would load and then crash shortly afterwards.

The 263.09 driver did work with two GTX460 graphics cards in pseudo SLI but this driver is dated the 22nd of November 2010, so we can't assume that many graphics enthusiast users would be happy running with a four month old driver build. I know I wouldn't be.

The image above shows performance levels of various video cards. The GTX 460 OC SLi results are taken from a MSI P67A-GD65 motherboard with the same partnering hardware as the Lucid results taken from the Sapphire motherboard. Its not an exact science, but it shows that Lucid pays a noticeable performance penalty.

We lost track of how many hard locks, BSOD's and system crashes took place over the last week using the Lucid Hydra Platform.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Great results from the Sapphire Pure Black P67/2600k system, leading the pack by a noticeable margin.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

The Core i7 2600k processor is a great processor for a rendering workstation, especially when overclocked. Even at reference values it is scoring way in advance of the previous generation Core i7 950.

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Results are close to what we have experienced with other P67 boards in the past.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

A very important part of the overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance, so we are using two of our favourite benchmark utilites CrystalMark X64 Edition and HDTach. The Corsair Force F40 SSD drive is on test today.

Performance is good from the modestly priced SSD drive showing around 270 MB/s read performance from the Crystalmark testing.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 is one of the finest solutions for the Blu-Ray experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Bluray Disc of Avatar, one of our favourite sci-fi films in recent years.

Average CPU load is around 11 percent, meaning that the 2600k has plenty of cycles free for other tasks.

We recorded CPU demand over a specific period of time to give a ‘real world' rolling scale of activity. The Core i7 2600k is hardly being troubled by HD playback, which is exactly what we want to see. The P67 board gives no indication of any heightened CPU states throughout our testing, falling in line with previous tests.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online.

Flash isn't an ideal platform for video content as it can be quite CPU intensive. The 2600k pairing with P67 motherboard only takes around 15percent CPU time for flash media streaming, which is a great result.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favorite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people.

Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance. We are using the latest beta which has optimisations for the Sandybridge architecture.

The 2600k is an encoding powerhouse, with a final time registered of 11 minutes and 22 seconds, compared against the 2500k's time of 12 minutes and 7 seconds.

We are now going to test the USB 3.0 and 2.0 speed, so we used the fastest drive we have, the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB, which is an Toshiba based SSD product within a USB 3.0 capable enclosure.

Today for testing we first copied a 3.9GB MKV file to and from the Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 drive.

USB 3.0 performance is excellent, recording over 140MB/s when reading from the drive. USB 2.0 performance is solid, and is limited by the platform.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	Sapphire P67/Sapphire 6970
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

Very high quality of image is displayed by the Sapphire HD6970, running on the Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

Performance results are good across the high end boards we used for testing today, showing good scaling from the CrossfireX solutions.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)

The GTX580 churns out 95 frames per second in single configuration, outperforming the HD6970 by a noticeable margin. The CFx2 and CFx3 configurations deliver strong scaling, up to 157 frames per second.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

AMD hardware always scores well with the Resident Evil 5 DirectX engine from Capcom and scaling is quite good, scoring 108 fps with a single HD6970, and up to 175 fps with three in CFx.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We are testing in DX11 mode with all settings on the highest. Direct X 11 features are on high.

Lost Planet 2 isn't one of the best games released in recent months, however it is a great showcase of Direct X 11 technology and can bring very powerful hardware to a standstill. We can see from these specific tests that the GTX580 is easily outperforming the HD6970 in this benchmark and can even compare against two HD6970's in CFx. The scaling in 3 way CrossfireX is quite impressive, scoring 115 fps.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

We are testing across three screens in Direct X 11 mode with 4aa and 16af enabled. All settings are switched to high.

Crossfire scaling is fairly good, although a single card is even enough to power this game with smooth frame rates throughout.

Crysis Warhead, like the original Crysis, is set in the near future when an ancient alien spacecraft is discovered on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of former SAS Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns. In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield.

The engine is still a system killer, all these years later, but modern day hardware can finally generate the frame rates we wanted when it was released !

We would need to lower the image quality settings to get this game perfectly playable with either single or dual card configurations. Overclocking the processor past 4ghz would also push through a couple of extra frames per second, critical with such a demanding title.

F1 2010 is a video game based on the 2010 season of the Formula One world championship. It is the sequel to the 2009 video game based on the same series. It was released in September 2010 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Windows platforms. The game was confirmed by Codemasters on 23 April 2009. The game engine is based on the new EGO 1.5 engine, an unofficially titled evolution of the EGO 1.0 engine that was created specially for the title.

We are testing across three screens with 4aa and 8af enabled and ultra quality settings in DX11 mode.

Crossfire with this game was tempremental with older drivers but it seems to be working well now with the latest Catalyst. All configurations are perfectly playable, although the single card solution dipped a few times under 25fps. Overclocking the system would help increase this a little to smooth out the frame rates.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test at 1080p so that all video cards can be compared throughout our reviews. Obviously driver updates might enhance performance slightly over time, but as a rule, its a useful way for us to present the findings.

The Pure Black P67 Hydra Motherboard delivers solid results with our HD6970 testing, from 51.4 fps in single card mode to 133.4 fps with three of them in CrossfireX.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Scoring almost 44,000 points in 3dmark Vantage at performance settings is not an easy task, but three of the Sapphire HD6970's in CFx managed to deliver some serious frame rate performance. These results aren't as high as our testing with the X58 Pure Black Board and higher end Intel processor, but the 2600k still manages to deliver some great performance results.

The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Motherboard is a rather unique product, combining the Lucid Hydra chip within a high quality board design to cater to all possible demands of gaming enthusiast user. Sapphire have used quality Japanese solid capacitors and high performance MOFSET's throughout, which helps ensure stability when pushed hard.

Sadly, the Lucid Hydra implementation proved less than stable throughout a week of testing for us, and while we managed to get some configurations working, we would still experience random crashing and overall performance problems. Mixing several makes of GTX460 gave hard locks and blue screens of death.

We did manage to get two matched gigabyte GTX460 overclocked cards working with 3DMark titles, but we still had to deal with random crashes in many of the major gaming titles.

Mixing and matching AMD and Nvidia cards proved even less successful. We feel there is a lot of work still to be done before this is a viable platform and I honestly can say that this has proved one of the most painstakingly arduous reviews I have ever undertaken.

The last Lucid Driver driver release was made on the 17th of January (V 1.7.104a) and while it states support for ‘all‘ Nvidia and AMD drivers, the ‘what's new' list shows ‘ATI WHQL support for 10.12' (December 2010) and ‘Nvidia WHQL Driver 263.09 issues fixed' (November 2010). We aren't sure if Lucid still need to work on the newest drivers, but we didn't have much luck with the brand new Nvidia or AMD sets.

Gaming enthusiast users won't want to be using 4 month old drivers for complete support and stability. Lucid need to be updating these drivers fortnightly especially as the latest games need profiles to work correctly. Looking through their driver history, there is a release in January, one in November of last year, and then two in October. I don't think this is good enough, not for this immensely demanding gaming audience.

If we omit the Lucid Hydra from the equation then the board proves to be a great choice. We overclocked our 2600k processor to 4.8ghz with a modest air cooler and 8GB of performance 2,000mhz gaming memory was rock solid throughout our testing, even though the board specifications list 1,600mhz as a limitation. The bios seems spartan on first glance, but it actually works really well and didn't fall over once during testing.

Sapphire haven't cut any corners with the board design, there is handy access to a CMOS reset button, as well as dual bios switches for emergency situations. Thankfully, we never had to use the dual bios switch and even after some overclocking failures, a simple press of the reset CMOS button got the board back into a bootable situation.

The Pure Black P67 Gaming capabilities are strong with four slots offering a wide variety of multi GPU options, although the last slot is 4x bandwidth when all are occupied. CrossfireX performance was equally good, two and three HD6970's from Sapphire proved to scale very well.

Overall, this board has impressed me, but if you are contemplating buying the Pure Black P67 Hydra with multi card Nvidia demands at heart, then look elsewhere, you really want to avoid the Lucid Hydra chip at all costs.

Unfortunately, Sapphire's Pure Black P67 is a costly product, retailing at £199.99 in the UK. They have to charge a premium for the Lucid Hydra technology. This is the only aspect of the board we don't like, and while it is easily omitted when using the product, the price point is a little harder to ignore. Sapphire really would have been better just forgetting about SLI support and ditching the Lucid Hydra technology completely, much like they did with their excellent Pure Black X58.

Pros:

• solid as a rock
• great overclocking product
• good crossfireX scaling
• well designed
• Sata 6GBps and USB 3.0 performance is great

Cons:

• Lucid Hydra is less than impressive

KitGuru says: We can still recommend this product, as a solid, high performing enthusiast grade motherboard. The price premium due to the inclusion of Lucid technology really is tough to swallow however.

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