Sapphire Office Visit - X79 Revealed

Early this year I was able to review the Sapphire Pure Black P67, the board didn't review well in our tests but was unique in that it featured the Lucid Hydra control chip.  The Hydra chip is a very unique bridge that can manage Multi GPU communication without the need of vendor specific technologies like SLI and Crossfire.  Simply put you can harness the power of multi GPU and no longer be limited to using cards from the same vendor or even GPU family. 

The Pure Platinum Z68 shares a similar layout to the P67 edition but Sapphire has removed the Lucid chip in favor of a revised PCI Express layout and Virtu graphics support.  You will find three PCI Express video card slots with the gray one at the bottom using bandwidth from the chipset.

One of the primary reasons to buy a Z68 over the popular P67 is the addition of graphics support normally found in the H67.  This Sapphire board comes with 4 graphics connections along with the option of using a discrete graphics card of your choosing.

Bluetooth comes standard on all Pure Black motherboards, just look for the translucent blue module hanging off the back of the I/O panel