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The Pure Platinum Z68 is another strong release from Sapphire, and over the course of a week we didn't experience any instability. The motherboard is fairly easy to overclock, although it needs more user intervention than the fantastic ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen 3, which we reviewed last week.
The only real weakness right now for Sapphire is their bios configuration. Personally, I am not that bothered about the lack of UEFI, but the bios will demand more experimention and fine tuning of settings. We have also noticed that the Sapphire product is slightly less compatible with some memory sticks. For instance the ADATA performance gaming memory we used with the Fatal1ty @ 2133mhz would only run at 1866mhz on the Sapphire board. There is clearly room for improvement on this level, but we are confident it will come with time. On a more positive note, the Sapphire board was exceptionally good at recovering from over zealous settings, and we never had to use the reset CMOS button once.
The Pure Platinum board layout is excellent, although we noticed with a long graphics card in the first slot that one of the fan headers was very tight and might not be usable with a fatter cooler in place. The last two SATA 3 ports will also be hidden under the GPU cooler, but thankfully they are horizontally mounted so hard drives can be fitted beforehand, without having to fumble for the location.
Connectivity is first class, with a myriad of USB 2 and 3 ports, Bluetooth and onboard HDMI, DVI, Displayport and VGA output supported.
Pros:
- Overclocks well.
- Very stable and recovers well if pushed too high.
- Connectivity is first class.
- performance is not lacking.
Cons:
- Bios isn't as user friendly as leading products.
- we experienced some memory compatibility issues at higher speeds.
Kitguru says: A strong release from Sapphire, but we hope their development team continue to work on the bios as they lag behind leading designs from companies such as Asus and Asrock.
