The Motherboard

Having a look at the board, the overall design is very similar to that of the X58 one we looked at. The overall color design is black and blue with the PCB itself being black. It's a pretty good looking board which is going to be important to someone who has a window on their case.

Keeping with the "Pure Black" naming theme that we saw on the X58 board, this one is called the Pure Black P67 Hydra. It's worth noting that the "Hydra" name doesn't revolve around water of any kind; it instead refers to the Lucid Hydra chip which we'll come to later on.

Starting to have a closer look around the board, we can see in the bottom corner we've got seven SATA ports. One sits on its own while another six are paired together. The black ones are SATA2, while the red ones are SATA3. The ones on the left paired with the black run on the south bridge, while the right two SATA3 ports run on the Marvell 9128 controller.

Across the bottom of the board and starting from the right, we've got that extra SATA2 header we mentioned above and just above that we also have a little debug LED. Continuing to move left, we see two USB headers, fan header and a FireWire header. Moving further over, we've got a BIOS selector, power, reset and reset CMOS button, another fan header and an extra Molex in the event you have a beefier VGA setup going on.