14 DAY TRIAL // Usually, Sapphire doesn't have the habit of releasing Intel motherboards, but the company seems to be widening its product portfolio as during CES 2011 has unveiled a not-yet-finalized version of a P67 board that is compatible with Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors.
The move is extremely surprising as Sapphire's hasn't released any new Intel mainboard models since the LGA 775 days, when ATI still made Intel chipsets.
Pictured thanks to SemiAcurate, the board carries a Rev: 0.0 tag, so there still seems to be some time until the final version is ready, but, even so, it looks fairly impressive.
Taking a look at the board, it becomes quickly obvious that its most prominent feature is the Lucid Hydra chip placed between the first two PCI Express x16 slots that enables users to mix and match different Nvidia and AMD graphics cards and offers SI support.
In addition, this allows for three PCIe x16 slots to be made available, although these drop to x8 when more than one graphics card is in use.
A forth gray PCIe x16 slot is also present near the bottom of the card, but this is only x4 electrically.
Other add-in cards can be installed in the two regular PCI slots, but, oddly, there isn't any PCIe x1 slot installed anywhere in sight.
Other features include four SATA 3Gbps ports, three SATA 6Gbps ports and one eSATA 6Gbps connector (eSATA and one SATA port courtesy of a Marvell controller), a BIOS debug LCD, on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons and a BIOS selection switch.
Moving to the back of the board, we find six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a PS/2 port, a Bluetooth dongle, a FireWire port, dual Marvell Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.
All the chockes carry a special design that includes a heatspreader and are also branded with a Sapphire logo.
Taking a final look at the PC-CI7S42P67, the board does indeed look promising, but it's tough to say how well it will perform when compared to solutions offered by more established motherboard vendors.
