14 DAY TRIAL // After what can only be described as a prolonged absence, Sapphire has returned in the Intel motherboard market, about a month or so ago the company announcing the Pure Black X58 and the Pure Black P67 Hydra boards, the latter just going through a detailed picture preview.
As its name clearly states, the board is built on top of an all-black PCB and features a Lucid Hydra LT24102 chip to allow its users to mix and match graphics cards from various vendors.
Up to four such GPUs can be installed at a time, although only the first PCI Express x16 slot gets 16 PCIe lanes, the second and the third one featuring eight PCIe lanes each, while the forth slot gets only four PCI Express lanes.
As the Pure Black P67 Hydra targets enthusiast users, Sapphire has decided to go with a more powerful power delivery circuitry and opted for a 6+2+3 phase power design for CPU Core, CPU VTT and memory.
In addition, the board is packed with a few other overclocking specific features such as on-board power and reset buttons, voltage measure points, a clear CMOS button, a diagnostic LED and a switchable dual BIOS.
In the storage department, the Pure Black P67 Hydra features seven on-board SATA connectors and an additional eSATA port placed on the rear I/O panel.
Four of the internal SATA ports are of the 6Gbps variety (two are driven by the Intel P67 PCH while the other by a Marvell 88SE9128 controller), the remaining three connectors delivering SATA 3Gbps speeds.
Moving to the back of the board, the rear panel houses 10 USB ports, including two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire ports, eight-channel or optical audio output, a PS2 keyboard/mouse combination port and integrated Bluetooth 2.1.
Pricing hasn't been established just yet, but the motherboard will retail for lower than £200 when it becomes available in late March or early April. (via Hexus)
