Building a Core i7 HTPC with Sapphire Mini ITX H67

The new Sapphire H67 Pure Platinum H67 motherboard is supplied in an attractive blue accented box with information on the front.

Inside there is a rather spartan bundle. A few SATA cables, a software disc with sticker, a motherboard manual, and a backplate for the system build.

The motherboard itself is an attractive Mini ITX design which features a full speed PCI express 2.0 16x slot. While they are obviously targeting a very different marketplace, the AMD Fusion boards only offer PCIE 4x slots. This can impact performance significantly. There is a mini PCe x1 slot on the back of the board. The Sapphire board also supports Lucid Virtu, but we don't like this technology and won't be dwelling on it today.

The motherboard is passively cooled, always a good thing to see when building a media center system. There are four SATA ports onboard. The two black ports are SATA 3GBps connectors, while the red coloured connectors are SATA 6GBps capable.

The Sapphire H67 Pure Platinum motherboard rear panel connectivity:

• Optical S/PDIF Out
• HDMI Port
• DisplayPort
• 10/100/1000 LAN Port
• USB 3.0 ports (two)
• D-SUB VGA Port
• DVI-D Ports
• Bluetooth
• USB 2.0 ports (four)
• Audio ports.

We have reviewed the Core i7 2600k before – and it overclocks like crazy!

Intel supplied both a Core i7 2600k for this review and their 250 GB Intel Solid State 510 series drive. We have reviewed the smaller 120GB model in this series before and it scored very well. This drive uses the Marvell controller which is used in the C400 drive, although Intel have fine tuned this one to suit their specific units. We will be testing this thoroughly later in the review.

The 250GB version of the drive is considerably faster than the 120GB version we reviewed before:

250 GB Intel 510 Series

• Sequential Read: Up to 500 MB/s
• Sequential Write: Up to 315 MB/s

120 GB Intel 510 Series

• Sequential Read: Up to 450 MB/s
• Sequential Write: Up to 210 MB/s

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