The Motherboard

Looking at the board, the overall design of it is very similar to that of the other Sapphire boards we've looked at. We've got a black / blue color scheme going on and we can see the Pure Platinum Z68 branding in the bottom right corner. Looking at the board from over the top, there's nothing really that stands out massively, so let's move in closer and have a look at what's going on.

Moving closer into the board, you can see we've got an even split with 3x Legacy PCI slots and 3x PCIe x16 slots. The PCIe setup is just as you'd expect; the top slot is x16 but if the two blue slots are used, they will run at x8. As for the bottom most slot which is grey, that runs at x4.

This setup is a little bit of a weird one to be honest. We've got way too many Legacy PCI slots. Personally, I think boards should be moving away from having any, but to have three just seems kind of ridiculous. The lack of any PCIe x1 slots is also annoying as it means you have to use the x16 slots if you want to make use of other PCIe cards.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we've got a Molex power connector used to help provide extra power to the video cards. Continuing to move over, we've got a clear CMOS button, reset button and power button. Next to that we've got a little switch that lets you switch between two BIOSs that are installed. Following that, we've got four USB 2.0 headers, while above that we've got our LED debug meter and finally we've got our front panel header.

Turning the corner, we've got a total of four SATA ports; the black ones are SATA II and run off the Z68 chipset, the red ones are SATA III and the two bunched together with the four SATA II ports also run off the Z68 chipset. As for the other two SATA III ports, they run off the Marvel 9172 controller.