If you’ve been following our website recently, you’ve had the chance to read our review of Sapphire’s Pure Black X58 motherboard. At the time, we concluded that Sapphire might have just been a bit late with an X58-based model, although the product itself was of highest quality. This time, there’s no telling that Sapphire’s late, but the true question is whether the model at hand can cope with much more reputed motherboard manufacturers.
Pure Black P67 has been designed by Sapphire engineers as an all-around model. The fact that this is Sapphire’s only LGA 1155 model in their entire portfolio also contributes to this impression. Simply put, if you want a Sandy Bridge CPU and a Sapphire motherboard, Pure Black P67 is the only option. This motherboard is based on Intel’s P67 controller logics, and since Sapphire was running a bit late with this model as well (very luckily, as it’ll turn out), the revision on this model is the latest, B3. The motherboard itself is a full ATX one (30.5x24.2 cm). All motherboard manufacturers seem to have understood that this largest, basic PC component should look good other than perform good, and Sapphire has indeed made a very likeable and visually balanced model. The cooling system also looks decent and protects vital components from overheating even when well overclocked.
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Sapphire has done their part of the job well. There are two BIOS chips on board, which is something that enthusiasts will know how to appreciate. There’s a microswitch for choosing the appropriate BIOS, which is simple enough and probably the best solution there is. Power and Reset buttons are also there, and so is the CMOS Clear button, placed instead of the jumper - yet another clever move. The diagnostic display seems rather simplistic, until you realise that it displays CPU temperature the entire time the motherboard is on. This is bound to be popular amongst users with a transparent side panel. Besides, hardware readings are always more reliable than any piece of software you may be running.
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Sapphire’s Pure Black P67 has no USB 3.0 connectors on the backplate, but they are available via the I/O panel nevertheless. In general, the layout is very good. It’s always good to see two PCI slots available, as high-quality audio and TV cards are yet to switch entirely to PCI-Express, despite the PCI standard being ancient. There are no PCI-E x1 slots, but there are three PCI-E 2.0 x16 ones, as well as one PCI-E 1.0 x16 slot that works in x4 mode. If you’re planning on a multi-GPU configuration, whether it’s NVIDIA’s SLI or AMD’s CrossFireX, pay attention to the fact that the second and third slot will be working in x8 mode. In practice, this means that you’ll only have a bottleneck with two AMD HD 6990 or NVIDIA GTX 590 graphics cards. The fourth physical slot remains available for a high-quality PCI-E x1 audio card, for instance. If you decide to crossbreed AMD’s and NVIDIA’s graphics cards, there’s the Lucid Hydra processor that we’ve already mentioned. Practically, this means that performance scaling will be better in the case of using two AMD HD 6950 cards, for example, than using a traditional CrossFireX setup. As for Realtek’s ALC892 sound chip, we’ve already met it on a number of occasions, and it’s a decent audio codec all in all - an adverb that applies to Marvell’s 88E8057 gigabit LAN chip as well.
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Sapphire has given much attention to the I/O panel on Pure Black P67, and we have to say that we haven’t seen a more complete one lately. Literally every known standardised connector that you could ask for is there. Good work, Sapphire. The addition of a Bluetooth module is a very clever move as well, although we would’ve preferred one supporting the 3.0 standard instead of the implemented 2.1 one.
The chipset has two-phase voltage filtering, whereas the DIMM sockets, i.e. RAM, are served by three coils. The coils themselves can be described as good-looking, as it’s a design we haven’t previously met. The CPU voltage has eight phases reserved for itself, and interestingly enough, we got better results when the LLC (Load Line Calibration) technology was turned off, so let’s move onto this model’s true value.
