Sapphire Encourages Overclocking with New Pure Platinum Z68 Motherboard

In the days of yore, overclocking was a complicated process that sometimes involved dip switches, lead pencils, pricey components, fairy dust, the right incantation, and a little bit of luck. It's considerably easier these days to push your processor well past its rated frequency, a point that's underscored by the tools Sapphire provides with its new Pure Platinum Z68 motherboard.

As the name gives away, Sapphire's latest slice of silicon is built around Intel's Z68 chipset for second generation Sandy Bridge processors. It sports four DDR3 memory slots with support for up 16GB of DDR3-1600+ (and up 32GB "when suitable modules become available"), three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots with CrossFire support, three of those old school 32-bit PCI slots (anyone still using those?), four SATA 6Gbps ports, four SATA 3Gbps ports, RAID 0/1/5/10 support, 8-channel onboard audio, four USB 2.0 ports (rear I/O) and four USB 2.0 headers (internal I/O), two USB 3.0 ports (rear I/O), and some other odds and ends.


Of interest to overclockers, Sapphire equipped its Pure Platinum Z68 motherboard with a Dual BIOS for "experimentation and updates." You'll also find voltage test pads on the edge of the board for precise measurement of CPU and memory circuit voltages, as well onboard buttons for clearing the CMOS and restarting/powering the board. There's also a digital debug display.

Finally, Sapphire bundles in its proprietary Mainboard TriXX software for Windows-based overclocking in case you're not comfortable playing around in the BIOS.

No word on price or availability.