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The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 board arrives in a shiny box with the name of the product in the middle. Specifications and product support are listed along the bottom of the package.
Sapphire have been rather mean with their motherboard bundles, and the Pure Platinum Z68 hasn't changed our views. You get a short, well written manual, a software and driver disc, a backplate, and some SATA cables.
The motherboard is dark with a mixture of red and blue ports/slots catching the eye. The heatsinks are black.
The board supports up to 16GB of memory, across 4 slots. To keep the install as simple as possible, there is a removable sticker on the ports which instructs the end user to use the blue ports first, then the black.
The board has four SATA 2 ports (black), and four SATA 3 ports (red) along the bottom. There is support for Raid 0, 1, 5 and 10.
There are three PCI E ports on the Pure Platinum Z68. The two top blue slots are PCI E 2.0 x16 and when paired up in Crossfire drop to x8 link speed. The bottom PCI E x16 slot (grey) operates at x4 link speed. There are three black PCI slots in this area.
The Pure Platinum Z68 has a dual bios switch. Beside this is a power and reset button, as well as a reset CMOS button for emergency situations.
There is a Debug LED display readout to help when troubleshooting problems. Below this are 8 USB header connectors and the front panel header, which is clearly labelled so you don't need to refer to the rather skimpy manual.
The Sapphire motherboard has 5 x 3 pin header connectors for system fans, as well as a CPU fan header.
Sapphire have included a 4 pin molex power connector at the bottom of the PCI slot area, this apparently helps with power delivery under multiple GPU load, although we never needed to use it during testing. Just as well as it is in a rather awkward position for easy access.
The I/O panel of the motherboard offers the following connectivity options:
- 4x USB 2.0 port
- 2x USB 3.0 port
- 1x VGA(D-Sub) port
- 1x HDMI port
- 1x DisplayPort 1.1a
- Audio I / O ports
- Bluetooth® 2.1 + EDR by Atheros AR3011
- Single Link DVI
- PS/2 KB/MS combo port
All in all this is a very well equipped panel, with native support for both digital and analogue video out connectors.
The Sapphire board is well made and they are using solid capacitors with super low ESR and high heat resistance for added stability under overclocked situations. The board uses Sapphire Diamond Chokes which improve load regulation. These are ‘patent pending' designs with integral heatsink. Sapphire claim they are more power efficient than a standard choke.
The overall board layout is good, although we found a minor problem, in that a large graphics card in the first PCI E slot will cover the outer most SATA 3 ports. Cables can still be fitted, as they run in parallel with the PCB, but getting access might require the removal of the graphics card.
A long graphics card can also cause a fitting issue for one of the 3 pin fan headers (auxfan) as can be seen in the images above.
ALways a shame their products dont support SLI.
Very fair review. It seems more aimed at enthusiast users with a little more knowledge of the bios. When I read the reviews of ASROCK and asus boards, there are settings basically which take out all of the work. Just one setting for a clock speed for the processor installed. This is a great idea.
I wouldnt have a problem with the sapphire ;’slightly old fashioned’ bios settings, but for a newbie,. they would be better investing in a different board with UEFI, kiddie proof settings.
DIdnt Sapphire poach some of the engineers from ASUS or something? probably why they are doing so well with the board designs.