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Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £125
inc VAT

A fine example of a Z68 board - if you want to use Quick Sync and SSD caching, it's a good buy

Specifications

LGA1155, ATX, Intel Z68 Express chipset, supports: Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 (Sandy Bridge)

http://www.pixmania.co.uk

Our Best Buy Intel Sandy Bridge processor, the Core i5-2500K, is ripe for overclocking. It has an unlocked processor multiplier, which means you can make the processor run faster than its stock speed without changing the speed of other components such as the memory, so making it easier to achieve a stable overclock.

Sapphire main

Processor multiplier control was available on Intel’s P67 Express chipset, but not on H67 Express boards – which supported the Sandy Bridge processors’ integrated graphics. This meant that, when buying a motherboard, you had to choose between overclocking and on-board graphics.

The Z68 Express chipset finally brings these two features together, providing both multiplier-based overclocking and outputs for the processor’s onboard graphics. Being able to use the onboard graphics also gives you access to Intel’s Quick Sync technology, which speeds up video encoding in certain applications. Z68 Express also has support for SSD caching, which uses a small-capacity SSD to store frequently-accessed data to speed up Windows.

Sapphire’s Z68 Pure Platinum is a fairly inexpensive Z68 Express board. It’s fully loaded, though; you get VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort sockets on the rear for the processor’s graphics, built-in Bluetooth, USB3 and 7.1 sound outputs (but no optical or coaxial S/PDIF, though you can still output digital audio over HDMI). On the board itself are three PCI Express x16 slots and two PCI expansion ports, four SATA3 and four SATA2 sockets and four USB2 headers for a further eight USB2 ports, if your case has the necessary ports. There are no USB3 headers for extra USB3 ports, unfortunately.

Sapphire Z68 ports
Graphics outputs aplenty point to the Z68 chipset onboard

The board has a standard text BIOS rather than a graphical UEFI, so it took us a while to find the overclocking options. There are no overclocking presets, but you can adjust the processor ratio and motherboard bus speed easily enough.

Quick Sync only supports certain applications, so wouldn’t speed up our Handbrake-based video encoding benchmark. When testing with Cyberlink’s MediaEspresso, the time taken to encode a six-minute 1080p AVCHD video to iPhone 4 format dropped from 2m 56s with Quick Sync disabled to 1m 58s with it turned on – a 33% faster encode.

Quick Sync is well worth using, but fitting a dedicated graphics card, as most of those interested in overclocking are likely to do, will disable the Sandy Bridge processor’s onboard graphics and therefore Quick Sync will no longer work. To get around this Sapphire provides a program called Virtu, which lets you keep the onboard graphics active while still using the discrete graphics card. Virtu worked fine for us in combination with an AMD Radeon HD 5770 – Quick Sync ran at full speed and so did our graphics benchmarks.

The Z68 Express chipset’s other big feature is SSD caching. Having an SSD as your Windows boot disk makes sense, as you can take advantage of an SSD’s fast speeds to increase loading times for your operating system and programs, while leaving all your documents and media files on a normal, larger hard disk. The disadvantage of this arrangement is that SSDs are expensive and have a relatively small capacity; given that modern games can be over 8GB each, you’ll quickly fill up a £70 64GB disk.

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Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Processor socket LGA1155
Form factor ATX
Size 305x244mm
Processor support Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 (Sandy Bridge)
Processor external bus 100MHz
Chipset north bridge Intel Z68 Express
Chipset south bridge Intel Z68 Express
Passively-cooled north bridge yes
Integrated graphics No
Supported memory type DDR3 800, 1066, 1333, 1600
Maximum memory speed PC3-12800
Memory slots 4
Maximum memory 16GB
Dual-channel support yes

Buying Information

Price £125
Supplier http://www.pixmania.co.uk
Details www.sapphiretech.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors 1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots 3
Dual graphics architecture none
PCI-E x4 slots 0
PCI-E x1 slots 0
PCI slots 2
Fan headers 4
Floppy ports 0
IDE ports 0
Serial ATA ports 8
RAID chipset (max disks) Intel Z68 Express (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5)

Features

Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports) Realkek HD audio (6x analogue out)
USB2 ports / headers 6/4
Firewire ports / headers 0/0
Legacy ports none
Other ports VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI
Cables included 4x SATA
Brackets included none
Software included none

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustment CPU/memory
CPU clock max adjustment 300MHz

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