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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
Now thats what im talking about !
Thats a hell of a nice little system, better than my big ass desktop rig 🙁
Id put in the new iceQ 6970 or something like that. let it kick some serious ass, but noise and wattage would rise a lot.
I think over £1000 is a bit much for any media center, but thats more a full fledged performance PC. that case seems pretty cool though.
Nice board from Sapphire, under £100 is a good price point
The board is fantastic. its put me in mind to build a high end, small computer for downstairs. id probably opt for the 2500k.
The PSU seems overpowered for the build, but at least it would be running quiet due to low overhead?. a method in the madness? obviously there for a better discrete card later if wanted.
I always meant to build a media center and never got tempted by Fusion or ATOM as my mate has an atom desktop he built for 200 quid. he has lost all his hair using it, its that bloody slow.
this board looks to be ideal for a new PC. its got everything you need,. well maybe except crossfire support.
Yeah thats lovely, nice job, I could live with that myself
Personally id go for a silverstone case, and use a 2500k with maybe a low noise card in the 68xx range.
AT first I thought the system was unbalanced, why put a low end video card in with a Core i7 2600k? I see however the point now, its to keep noise down to as low as possible, but still offering decent gaming. im surprised that card is as good as the tests show. very impressive from sapphire.
Nice system, my media center isn’t as powerful as that, but I really only use it for watching tv shows via the tv.
The 2600k is really a very good price now, just over £200 for 4+4 cores. wasnt it closer to £300 when it was released?
All very well, but where do you plug in the TV tuner (or more likely, TWO tuners)?
The problem with mini-ITX is that there just aren’t any slots to plug stuff into, which is a bit of a non-starter for a media centre. USB isn’t really the way to go for this kind of thing (hardly makes for a tidy system and it’s relatively expensive), so the only way to go is a larger mother board.