Sapphire Pure Platinum Z77K Motherboard Review

We have reviewed a handful of Z77 boards to date, and as we mentioned at the start of the review Sapphire are facing tough competition from long standing industry leaders such as Asus and Asrock.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z77K is undoubtedly a quality board, finished to the highest standards utilising solid capacitors and multi-phase PWM voltage regulation circuitry with Diamond Black chokes.

We also like the fact that Sapphire have adapted and implemented their graphics card cooling solutions across to the motherboard designs.

We had no problems overclocking the Z77K, easily achieving 4.6ghz with the Core i7 3770k with minimal effort. The Sapphire Z77k does slightly undervolt the processor as highlighted earlier in the review, but it is straightforward to compensate for this in the bios. Sapphire are certainly making ground in regards to their bios implementations and we are confident that they will continue to improve throughout 2012 and into 2013.

We have noticed when Sapphire launch a new motherboard that sometimes the early bios revisions can exhibit post issues when dealing with high speed memory from specific manufacturers. We had problems with 2,133mhz and 2,400mhz memory from G.Skill, Kingston and Corsair and had to ignore XMP profiles, down-clocking manually to 1,600mhz. When this happened in the past with another Sapphire motherboard, they released a BIOS update several weeks later which addressed the problem. While we can't test a future bios in the pipeline, we do feel that this issue will be resolved in the coming weeks.

Additionally Sapphire could perhaps contemplate adding ‘pre overclock' settings for specific processors, in a similar fashion as ASUS and ASrock. This has proven popular with the inexperienced enthusiast audience who don't want to risk killing their hardware with ill informed settings.

Another minor niggle we could mention, would be the fact that they Sapphire only included a pair of SATA 3.0 connectors on the motherboard. This might not be an issue for some, but we would imagine that a small portion of the potential audience may have three or even four high performance Solid State drives.

The Pure Platinum Z77K has impressed me during the last week of stress testing. It exhibits the same stability we have enjoyed with other Sapphire motherboards tested in previous months and we can certainly offer our recommendation if reliability is a primary concern. We managed to overclock the Core i7 3770k to 4.6ghz with a £20 Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 and didn't encounter a single issue. Our chip can be pushed to 4.8ghz, but it would need a high end cooler such as the Corsair H100 for safe thermal performance.

Pros:

• Built to last.
• Overclocks well.

Cons:

• Early bios exhibits memory issues above 1,600mhz.
• No SLI support.

Kitguru says: A very strong release from Sapphire. We are waiting for a bios update to resolve the memory issues.

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