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Sapphire have been releasing a steady stream of products this year, and today we are looking at their latest motherboard, the Pure Platinum Z68 which targets the enthusiast Sandybridge audience. Can the Sapphire product offer enough to stand out in such a crowded marketplace?
To this point in time, the Sapphire Pure motherboard range has not failed to impress. With a team of dedicated engineers tweaking their own designs they have been able to offer competitively priced motherboards with strong overclocking capabilities.
The Z68 range is today's hottest enthusiast grade motherboard, it is the successor to the P67 series, which suffered a lot of negative attention due to the very public Cougar Point SATA issues. The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 is a dual bios motherboard with support for AMD Crossfire, USB 3.0, SATA 3, Bluetooth 2.1 and Lucid Virtua technology.
| Specification | Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 Motherboard |
| CPU | Support Intel LGA1155: Intel Core i7 /i5 / i3 series processors |
| BIOS | AMI BIOS, 16Mb Flash ROM |
| Memory | 4 slots 240-pin DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600+ non-ECC ,un-buffered memory.16 GB Max. |
| Graphics | Intel® HD Graphics |
|
Expansion Slots
|
3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots
3 x 32-bit PCI slots |
| Storage | 4 x Serial ATA III 6Gb/s connectors
4 x Serial ATA II 3Gb/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 |
|
Form Factor
|
ATX, Size 12″ x 9.6″ |
|
OS support
|
Windows 7 (32/64) bit |
ALways a shame their products dont support SLI.
Very fair review. It seems more aimed at enthusiast users with a little more knowledge of the bios. When I read the reviews of ASROCK and asus boards, there are settings basically which take out all of the work. Just one setting for a clock speed for the processor installed. This is a great idea.
I wouldnt have a problem with the sapphire ;’slightly old fashioned’ bios settings, but for a newbie,. they would be better investing in a different board with UEFI, kiddie proof settings.
DIdnt Sapphire poach some of the engineers from ASUS or something? probably why they are doing so well with the board designs.