Sapphire has been busy making a name for themselves as a high end motherboard maker in addition to their graphics card models.  The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 is their first foray into SandyBridge and comes with a long host of features common to the Z68 platform as well as features common to Sapphire’s GPUs such as a dual BIOS.  Hi Tech Legion had a great time overclocking with this board both manually and with the help of Sapphire’s TriXXX software, getting a i5-2500K all the way to 4.74GHz.  Read on to see this impressive board in action.

"The Pure Platinum Z68 is the Sapphire’s first entry for the Z68 chipset of Intel, which is capable of technologies such as Smart Response and Virtu. The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 includes 4 DIMM slots with support of up to 16GB of RAM with speeds of up to 1600+MHz. For network connectivity, the Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 has a Marvell chip controlled Gigabit LAN port and wireless capability via a Bluetooth 2.1 receiver. Storage options are many in the Pure Platinum Z68, with 8 total SATA ports; 4 SATA II with RAID 0,1,5,10 and AHCI controlled by the Z68 chipset, while there are 2 SATA III ports also controlled by the Z68 and the last 2 are controlled by Marvell’s controller. Peripherals on the Z68 Pure Platinum are 2 USB 3.0 with up to 12 total USB 2.0 ports (including the USB headers), with 4 on the rear panel."

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