Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 review

Our Best Buy Intel Sandy Bridge processor, the Core i5-2500K, is ripe for overclocking. It has an unlocked processor multiplier, which means you can make the processor run faster than its stock speed without changing the speed of other components such as the memory, so making it easier to achieve a stable overclock.

Processor multiplier control was available on Intel’s P67 Express chipset, but not on H67 Express boards – which supported the Sandy Bridge processors’ integrated graphics. This meant that, when buying a motherboard, you had to choose between overclocking and on-board graphics.

The Z68 Express chipset finally brings these two features together, providing both multiplier-based overclocking and outputs for the processor’s onboard graphics. Being able to use the onboard graphics also gives you access to Intel’s Quick Sync technology, which speeds up video encoding in certain applications. Z68 Express also has support for SSD caching, which uses a small-capacity SSD to store frequently-accessed data to speed up Windows.

Sapphire’s Z68 Pure Platinum is a fairly inexpensive Z68 Express board. It’s fully loaded, though; you get VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort sockets on the rear for the processor’s graphics, built-in Bluetooth, USB3 and 7.1 sound outputs (but no optical or coaxial S/PDIF, though you can still output digital audio over HDMI). On the board itself are three PCI Express x16 slots and two PCI expansion ports, four SATA3 and four SATA2 sockets and four USB2 headers for a further eight USB2 ports, if your case has the necessary ports. There are no USB3 headers for extra USB3 ports, unfortunately.

Graphics outputs aplenty point to the Z68 chipset onboard

The board has a standard text BIOS rather than a graphical UEFI, so it took us a while to find the overclocking options. There are no overclocking presets, but you can adjust the processor ratio and motherboard bus speed easily enough.

Quick Sync only supports certain applications, so wouldn’t speed up our Handbrake-based video encoding benchmark. When testing with Cyberlink’s MediaEspresso, the time taken to encode a six-minute 1080p AVCHD video to iPhone 4 format dropped from 2m 56s with Quick Sync disabled to 1m 58s with it turned on – a 33% faster encode.

Quick Sync is well worth using, but fitting a dedicated graphics card, as most of those interested in overclocking are likely to do, will disable the Sandy Bridge processor’s onboard graphics and therefore Quick Sync will no longer work. To get around this Sapphire provides a program called Virtu, which lets you keep the onboard graphics active while still using the discrete graphics card. Virtu worked fine for us in combination with an AMD Radeon HD 5770 – Quick Sync ran at full speed and so did our graphics benchmarks.

The Z68 Express chipset’s other big feature is SSD caching. Having an SSD as your Windows boot disk makes sense, as you can take advantage of an SSD’s fast speeds to increase loading times for your operating system and programs, while leaving all your documents and media files on a normal, larger hard disk. The disadvantage of this arrangement is that SSDs are expensive and have a relatively small capacity; given that modern games can be over 8GB each, you’ll quickly fill up a £70 64GB disk.

Intel’s SSD caching technology attempts to get around this by using a small-capacity SSD (you can use any size SSD you like, but the cache size is limited to 64GB, so it’s a waste to use a larger SSD) as a cache for frequently-accessed files from the normal hard disk. Setting up caching is easy, as long as you do it in the right order. You need to set your SATA controller to RAID mode, install Windows on the normal hard disk, then plug in the SSD. You then need to open Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology program and enable Acceleration.

Plug an SSD into one of the red SATA3 ports for the best speeds

Using a Patriot Pyro SE drive as a cache for our 7200RPM SATA hard disk, we found our Windows 7 boot time cut from 45s to 11s – exactly the same boot time as when we used the same SSD as a boot disk. It also speeded up hard disk access times – in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, sequential read speeds increased from 54.99MB/s to 363.6MB/s, while random read speeds of 512KB files increased from 30.45MB/s to 353.9MB/s. Both sequential and random small file write speeds stayed the same, however, at 55.31MB/s and 30.78MB/s – much slower than the 171.1MB/s and 170.7MB/s we saw when using the SSD as a normal disk.

Using an SSD as a cache for your hard disk speeds up read times significantly, but, as expected, makes no difference to writes

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 such as Asus’ P8P67 LE.