Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra

With some tests the performance of the Pure Black P67 motherboard fell behind slightly, which causes some slight concerns, but there is no major fallback in performance across the board.

We have been using Sapphire graphics cards for years and they continue to work remarkably well and continue to introduce new compelling graphics cards at great value, with interesting features, and continue to be incredibly reliable from this premiere AMD AIB partner. Now they have dived into the high-end motherboard market similar to how eVGA and BFG Tech have done in the past when expanding their sights beyond just graphics cards.

The Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra doesn't offer any features not found on other high-end motherboards, aside from the Lucid Hydra chipset not being common to most Sandy Bridge motherboards, but that feature is currently unsupported under Linux. The rest of the motherboard plays just fine under modern Linux distributions just as other P67 motherboards have been known to do thanks to Intel's Linux engineering resources.

Sapphire's Pure Black P67 Hydra is currently retailing around $220 USD, which is at a good value considering the Bluetooth, Firewire, Lucid Hydra (though useless to Linux users), USB 3.0, SATA 3.0, and other features. For reference, the recently reviewed ECS P67H2-A2 goes for just under $200 USD.