14 DAY TRIAL // Showcased for the very first time more than four months ago at the CeBIT 2011 fair, Sapphire's Pure Platinum Z68 motherboard is finally getting ready to become available worldwide as the board was listed on the company's website and also showed up in the offer of a few online retailers.
Just as its name implies, Sapphire's latest creation is built around the Intel Z68 chipset, which is paired together with several Marvell and ASMedia controllers to offer additional functionality.
This means that the motherboard offers four SATA 6Gbps ports instead of the two available in the Z68 PCH, while the ASMedia IC throws USB 3.0 support into the mix.
Otherwise, the Pure Platinum Z68 features the usual four SATA 3Gbps ports, four DDR3 DIMM sockets, three 32-bit legacy PCI slots, as well as three PCI Express x16 slots. The first two of these are x8 electronically, while the third has 4 PCIe lanes routed to it.
The motherboard is compatible with CrossFireX dual-GPU configurations (Sapphire doesn't have a license for Nvidia's SLI technology) and comes pre-fitted with a MOLEX plug to provide additional power when multiple graphics cards are installed.
Speaking of power, Sapphire's motherboard uses a 8+2 PWM design with a proadlizer capacitor to stabilize power lines.
Other overclocking-oriented features include a Power and Reset button, a BIOS selection switch and a LED debug display.
Moving to the back of the board, we find that Sapphire has installed a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port driven by a Marvell controller, 7.1-channel audio with digital S/PDIF out, a Bluetooth 2.1 dongle as well as DisplayPort, HDMI, D-Sub and DVI video outputs.
Sapphire has not yet officially launched the Pure Platinum Z68, but the board is already available for pre-order in Europe for about €139. (via VR-Zone)
