Introduction

We've looked at a lot of motherboards lately and the chances are if you're reading this, you know we're going to be looking at another one that carries with it the much loved Z68 chipset that launched a little back.

The board we're looking at today comes from the team over at Sapphire and let's be honest, they've been a little hit and miss when it comes to motherboards. The original X58 we looked at from the company was great, the P67 on the other hand not so much. The A75 was awesome and showed us some amazing overclocking capabilities.

So if we go off the trend that we've been seeing from Sapphire since the re-launch of their motherboards, the Z68 won't be quite the shining light that we hope. But we always hope to go against the trend and Sapphire are a little later to the market when compared to other companies, so hopefully they've done a good job with the board that will let it shine in a market that is flooded with great Z68 options already.

Before we find out just how it went on the performance side of things, though, there are a few things we need to do first. We need to see what's going on with the package, once that's done we'll take a closer look at the motherboard itself before we jump into the BIOS to see what's going on there.

Once that's done, we'll get into our testbed and cover the overclocking side of things before we get into the most important stuff - performance. Before we get into that and wrap everything up, we need to first check out the package.

The Package

Looking at the box design, we can see it's very similar to previous Sapphire boards we've looked at. It's a pretty funky black / reflective silver setup. The back of it also gives us a run down on some of the main features that are offered and the whole "PURE" thing is explained too.

Moving inside the package, it's all pretty bare. We've got a Quick Installation Guide, Driver CD, I/O back plate and six SATA cables.