Sapphire PT-CI7S33Z68 Pro Reviews

If you already use a P67 motherboard then there is no real reason to upgrade to a Z68 as the only thing you'll gain is the integrated graphics, but if you planning to upgrade to a Sandy Bridge based system then its well worth thinking about the Z28. It's not particularly cheap but Sapphire's Pure Platinum Z68 is a well built, fairly well featured addition to the growing range of Sapphire motherboards.

The Z68 chipset has definite advantages over P67 Express and H67 Express, and Sapphire's Z68 Pure Platinum is a good-value and well-specified Z68 motherboard, albeit with a mediocre BIOS and no automatic overclocking tools for novices. Unless you plan to use the Quick Sync and SSD caching features, you're better off with an inexpensive P67 Express board.

To wrap this up it really is going to depend on the price that this eventually retails at and how available it’s going to be. If there aren’t even going to be very many vendors that carry it then it probably won’t be very easily obtainable. I would love to see more vendors using some of the features of this board. LED BIOS debugging is one of my favorite features. It makes troubleshooting boot errors a real no-brainer. This board also has a very nice layout for the expansion slots. They run at x8, x8, x4, but this is fine for a CrossFireX setup. I wasn’t very pleased with the mixed color scheme on this board. There are going to be those that won’t mind it and there are going to be those that absolutely hate it. NVIDIA fans are probably going to avoid this board entirely.