Graphics card maker Sapphire continues to expand its lineup of motherboards and it has now rolled out a new board for Intel’s Sandy Bridge processorer for smaller systems. Sapphire Pure Platinum H67 is a mini-ITX motherboard that targets Intel’s latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors with Lucid Virtu support and a surprise on the bottom.
Sapphire Pure Platinum H67 uses a typical mini-ITX design for Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform and with the Intel H67 chipset there is focus on regular use, not so much the enthusiasts. Even if the motherboard doesn’t support overclocking Sapphire has added something extra. The board comes with many video outputs; VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort, but the trump is an extra PCI Express x16 slot for a discrete graphics card, and graphics switching technology Lucid Virtu. This means that you can use a more powerful graphics card and the integrated solution of the CPU, depending on workload, which maximizes the performance and optimizes the energy consumpton.
Another clever solution is a mini PCIe port on the back of the board. Unfortunately there is no picture showing the port, but the idea is to connect an expansion card there to add further functionality. An exciting solution that many mini-ITX users may find useful.
Sapphire has also used two full-size DIMM slots for DDR3 RAM. The LGA 1155 socket is flanked by solid state capacitors and cooled coils. The board offers four SATA ports (two SATA 6.0 Gbps and two SATA 3.0 Gbps) and dual USB 3.0 outputs. It brings Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity.
Sapphire ships the board with its TriXX software that enables users to optimize performance from Windows. Availability and price was not mentioned.
