Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra

Board Layout:

The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra has a black PCB and most of the connectors are either black or blue. Some of the USB and SATA connectors are also red. This P67 motherboard has four DDR3 memory slots supporting up to 16GB of RAM and speeds of DDR3-1600/1333/1066/800MHz. Next to the memory slots, in its conventional spot, is the 24-pin ATX power connector.

Working the way towards the bottom of the board, there are seven Serial ATA connectors. Four of the ports provided SATA 3.0 connections while the other three are bound to SATA 2.0. The chipset provides SATA RAID support for RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 configurations. Six of these Serial ATA ports are rotated 90 degrees right on the edge of the PCB while the seventh is located right at the bottom of the board next to the two USB headers. The P67 chipset is cooled by a small passive aluminum heatsink. Thankfully, for this high-end motherboard, there are no FDD or IDE connections.

The expansion slots on this motherboard include four PCI Express 2.0 x16 and two PCI slots. The PCI slots and the Hydra LT24102 chipset to make room for using dual-slot PCI Express graphics cards separate the four PCI-E x16 slots. The Lucid Hydra chipset is cooled by a small passive aluminum heatsink. This motherboard does not support NVIDIA SLI but it is ATI/AMD CrossFire compatible. Beneath the bottom of the PCB in this are the power and reset buttons. There is also a convenient reset CMOS switch. At the bottom of the motherboard is also a four-pin molex connector that needs to be used if utilizing all four PCI Express x16 slots in order to provide sufficient power to all graphics cards.

There is a tall heatsink next to the LGA-1155 CPU socket area to provide cooling for the power circuitry on the motherboard. This heatsink though nor any of the other components on the PCB should obstruct with the installation of most after-market heatsinks. The rear I/O panel ports include 10 USB ports, IEEE-1394 Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, audio outputs including optical audio, PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port, and integrated Bluetooth 2.1. Two of the ten USB ports operate on USB 3.0 while the other eight are standard USB 2.0 connections.

A Marvell 88E8057 PCI-E Gigabit LAN ASIC provides the Gigabit Ethernet and the audio can be thanked to a Realtek ALC892 ASIC.