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The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Motherboard is a rather unique product, combining the Lucid Hydra chip within a high quality board design to cater to all possible demands of gaming enthusiast user. Sapphire have used quality Japanese solid capacitors and high performance MOFSET's throughout, which helps ensure stability when pushed hard.
Sadly, the Lucid Hydra implementation proved less than stable throughout a week of testing for us, and while we managed to get some configurations working, we would still experience random crashing and overall performance problems. Mixing several makes of GTX460 gave hard locks and blue screens of death.
We did manage to get two matched gigabyte GTX460 overclocked cards working with 3DMark titles, but we still had to deal with random crashes in many of the major gaming titles.
Mixing and matching AMD and Nvidia cards proved even less successful. We feel there is a lot of work still to be done before this is a viable platform and I honestly can say that this has proved one of the most painstakingly arduous reviews I have ever undertaken.
The last Lucid Driver driver release was made on the 17th of January (V 1.7.104a) and while it states support for ‘all‘ Nvidia and AMD drivers, the ‘what's new' list shows ‘ATI WHQL support for 10.12' (December 2010) and ‘Nvidia WHQL Driver 263.09 issues fixed' (November 2010). We aren't sure if Lucid still need to work on the newest drivers, but we didn't have much luck with the brand new Nvidia or AMD sets.
Gaming enthusiast users won't want to be using 4 month old drivers for complete support and stability. Lucid need to be updating these drivers fortnightly especially as the latest games need profiles to work correctly. Looking through their driver history, there is a release in January, one in November of last year, and then two in October. I don't think this is good enough, not for this immensely demanding gaming audience.
If we omit the Lucid Hydra from the equation then the board proves to be a great choice. We overclocked our 2600k processor to 4.8ghz with a modest air cooler and 8GB of performance 2,000mhz gaming memory was rock solid throughout our testing, even though the board specifications list 1,600mhz as a limitation. The bios seems spartan on first glance, but it actually works really well and didn't fall over once during testing.
Sapphire haven't cut any corners with the board design, there is handy access to a CMOS reset button, as well as dual bios switches for emergency situations. Thankfully, we never had to use the dual bios switch and even after some overclocking failures, a simple press of the reset CMOS button got the board back into a bootable situation.
The Pure Black P67 Gaming capabilities are strong with four slots offering a wide variety of multi GPU options, although the last slot is 4x bandwidth when all are occupied. CrossfireX performance was equally good, two and three HD6970's from Sapphire proved to scale very well.
Overall, this board has impressed me, but if you are contemplating buying the Pure Black P67 Hydra with multi card Nvidia demands at heart, then look elsewhere, you really want to avoid the Lucid Hydra chip at all costs.
Unfortunately, Sapphire's Pure Black P67 is a costly product, retailing at £199.99 in the UK. They have to charge a premium for the Lucid Hydra technology. This is the only aspect of the board we don't like, and while it is easily omitted when using the product, the price point is a little harder to ignore. Sapphire really would have been better just forgetting about SLI support and ditching the Lucid Hydra technology completely, much like they did with their excellent Pure Black X58.
Pros:
- solid as a rock
- great overclocking product
- good crossfireX scaling
- well designed
- Sata 6GBps and USB 3.0 performance is great
Cons:
- Lucid Hydra is less than impressive
KitGuru says: We can still recommend this product, as a solid, high performing enthusiast grade motherboard. The price premium due to the inclusion of Lucid technology really is tough to swallow however.
£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