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The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra arrives in a stylish box with naming and specifications listed on the front.
As we experienced with their Pure Black X58 board, the bundle is spartan, with only sata cables, a software CD, manual and backplate included. The manual is a multi language affair and doesn't offer much detailed information on the product and settings. It is well written however which is refreshing.
The Sapphire Pure Black P67 uses high quality Japanese solid capacitors and high performance MOFSET's and we like the simple yet effective blue and black colour scheme. There is plenty of room around the CPU socket for the majority of third party coolers we have used. Obviously this is a slot 1155 motherboard, so LGA1156 processors are not compatible.
The board is a 305mm x 244mm ATX factor design.
The P67 Hydra features eight SATA connectors. Four are coloured red, which are 6GBps ports, two of which are powered by the P67 chipset and two from a Marvell 88SE9128 controller chip. A further three black SATA ports offer 3GBps speeds. The eight port is an eSATA connector which is on the rear I/O panel.
Around the CPU socket, Sapphire have included a large heatsink to help cool the components, this is wedged between the CPU socket and the rear I/O panel, yet is far enough away to not affect fitting of oversized coolers.
The board includes a Lucid Hydra LT24102 chip which allows for cross vendor multi GPU configurations. Sapphire will obviously have problems getting an Nvidia SLI license, which is why the Pure Black X58 was sold without support. This is a smart way to work around SLI licensing problems and we will look at the support and performance later in the review.
The first PCI E slot is 16x, slot 2 and 3 are 8x and the last one is 4x.
There are a total of 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2 USB 3.0 ports available. There is also Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and an older PS2 connector offered. Integrated BlueBooth 2.1 is included, as well as eight channel audio and optical audio output, which is provided by the RealTek ALC892 codec.
The board supports up to 16GB of memory via 4GB memory sticks populated in the four slots. Sapphire say that up to 1,600mhz memory is supported, but we will try 2,000mhz memory later to see how far we can push it.
£200? is that for real. their X58 board is £20 more !
I can understand them wanting to give people a talking point and offering support for nvidia multi card solutions but this technolology has just been slated no matter were I read about it. The X58 board they released had the best ideal, just forget SLI and work on single card and crossfireX solutions. It would have helped the price of this product by a long shot.
I really cant get over the price point. 200 for a P67, thats the same price as this killer model from asus http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-444-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1906
Good board for build qualty, I like sapphire products. always have. perfect if you are using AMD cards. I would have liked to see 6990 in CFx on it 🙂
Its moer expensive than a p67 board, generally, but its not that much, id buy it, even though I wouldnt touch lucid. might play around with it though, as I like tinkering.
Nice board layout, like the switches at the bottom. I hate seeing a board with CMOS switch undernearth a dual card graphics position
Seriously you have to be totally drunk, mad and on crack to buy it. For 11 Pounds less* you can get far superior motherboard – AsRock Fatality. Not a massive fan of AsRock, but Fatality so far received many glowing reviews which means that it is in fact very good product.
* – or for ~10 Pounds more with shipping to the continent.
Yeah its tough to even consider at 200 quid. if i was aiming that high, id just go for X58 and get a board for 20-30 more. and end up with three way memory.
Still its a good product to be fair, a lot of testing in this review showing its a good AMD gaming board. I think they took a risk with lucid to be different and its bitten them on the ass in regards to cost.
I think this is one of the dumbest ideas ever from Sapphire. people dont expect them to support nvidia, ditch SLI and dont rely on this lucid nonsense. no one likes it. SLI is bad enough as is crossfire needing driver profiles.
Lucid NEEDS DRIVER PROFILES FOR GAMES on top of this ! and with updates, what every 2 months? thats never going to work. this review is much too positive. id give this board 6/10. its a good board, but its nothing better than others at much less money without a useless feature.
Good review but this tech seems unfinished. It’s sli or nothin
Sapphire make good products but whoever said to include lucid needs bitchslapped
Will sapphire release a p67 without lucid on it?
Performance is good, especiall with 2ghz memory. But it’s overpriced for the spec.
Gd options for bad Design