Sapphire Pure P67 Hydra

Sapphire Pure P67 Hydra review

We've already taken a look at Sapphire's first Intel-based motherboard: the Pure Black X58, which together with the AMD based White Fusion announced Sapphire's re-emergence into the motherboard market. Hot on its heels comes the second high-end Intel based board, the Pure Black P67 Hydra, which, as you might gather from the name, not only uses Intel's current flagship chipset for the Sandy Bridge CPU's, the P67 Express, but also makes use of Lucid's HydraLogic graphics technology. Using Lucid's mix and match technology is a neat sidestep around the problems of multi-GPU licensing for a company like Sapphire, well known as one of AMD biggest AIB partners. Trying to go cap in hand to prise an SLI licence out of Nvidia would have been an interesting, if brief conversation, if nothing else. Multi-GPU The first thing that catches the eye are the four PCI-e graphics slots, only the top one of which runs at full x16 speed. The two following slots run at x8 speed while the fourth grey coloured slot runs at just x4 speed. The extra PCI-e lanes over and above that offered by the P67 chipset itself is another bonus of the Lucid Hydra silicon Sapphire has included.