Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra

When talking about Sapphire Technology on Phoronix it is usually about their vast selection of Radeon graphics cards for which they are very well known and are one of AMD's premiere AIB partners. Recently, they have also expanded to offer a limited selection of high-end AMD and Intel motherboards. Being from Sapphire, these motherboards are not some budget motherboards with nothing to separate them from its competitors, but are rather well designed and very innovative boards. As the first Sapphire motherboard being reviewed under Linux at Phoronix, we are looking at their interesting Sandy Bridge offering: the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra.

As implied by its name, the Sapphire Pue Black P67 Hydra uses Intel's P67 chipset for supporting the latest LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge processors. There is USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, and four PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, among many other features. There's also the Lucidlogix Hydra LT24102 chipset.

Features:

CPU
- Support Intel LGA1155: Intel Core i7 /i5 / i3 series processors

Chipset
- Intel P67 Express Chipset

Memory
- 2 Channel DDR3 Technology
- 4 slots 240-pin DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600+ non-ECC ,un-buffered memory
- 16 GB Max.

Expansion Slots
- 4 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots
- 2 x 32-bit PCI slots

Storage
- 4 x Serial ATA III 6Gb/s connectors
- 3 x Serial ATA II 3Gb/s connectors
- Supports HDDs with RAID 0, 1,5,10 functions

Audio
- Realtek ALC892 HD Audio CODEC with 8-Channel

Ethernet LAN
- Marvell 88E8057 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN

Contents:

The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard is not too flashy but is just a silver and black theme with the respective features of the ATX motherboard being listed on the various sides. Included with the motherboard was Serial ATA cables, the I/O panel, a Windows driver CD, and the Pure Black P67 manual. While motherboard vendors targeting enthusiasts tend to go overboard on bundling accessories, Sapphire goes surprisingly light. We like Sapphire's approach as most of the accessories often go unused and just lead to inflated pricing.