A tiny board with some serious ambition
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| SAPPHIRE PURE PLATINUM H67 |
When Intel was gazing into its crystal ball to get an idea of the impact Sandy Bridge might make on the market, it's a fair chance it didn't foresee an old motherboard format leaping back into the limelight.
Every now and again the ITX motherboard format, launched in 2001, makes an appearance with some brave manufacturer hoping this will be the time it takes off.
But with the coming of Sandy Bridge, at last it seems the format's time to bask in the sun has come, with the tiny platform now being able to offer performance previous generations of boards could only dream about. Right now, almost every motherboard manufacturer worth its salt has at least one Sandy Bridge-based ITX board in its line-up.
The latest manufacturer to join the Sandy Bridge/ITX revolution is Sapphire, with its Pure Platinum H67 based around Intel's H67 chipset. Compared to the last Sapphire ITX motherboard, the AMD Fusion-based Pure Fusion Mini E350. the H67 is light years ahead in performance terms.
That's thanks to its Intel LGA1155 i7/i5/i3 CPU support and the H67 chipset itself. The Fusion board is close in concept, but still the weak Brazos APU doesn't have anywhere near the processing grunt of the full-powered Intel chip. That said, it's not really in the same ballpark in terms of price or power consumption.
The Sapphire Pure Platinum H67 is not quite as well featured as the Zotac's H67-ITX WiR: you only get two SATA 3Gbps ports on the Sapphire board compared to the four Zotac supply, though both have twin SATA 6Gbps ports. Sapphire's board also misses out on the WiFi module that comes with the Zotac board.
It does still have the mini PCI-e slot, which sits underneath the board, plus there's Bluetooth built in. And, in place of the Zotac's WiFi aerial mount, the Pure Platinum H67 has a standard VGA output port. Mind you, this isn't the only output to feed a monitor/TV as you also get single HDMI, dual-link DVI and DisplayPort outputs.
Ports all present
The ports are standard stuff -well, apart from the antennae for the Atheros AR3011 Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR module. It would be standard for a mATX or lower-mainstream, full-sized ATX board, but not a wee thing like the Platinum. There are also four USB.2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports. Gigabit LAN and an audio block for 7.1 integrated audio, along with an optical S/PDIF out port.
As with all ITX boards, the limitations are apparent when it comes to expansion slots because there's only room for a single xl6 PCI-e slot. But still, it's a full-sized slot capable of handling a proper discrete card.
It's difficult to find anything to dislike here. It may have slightly less in its feature list than, say. Zotac's H67-ITX WiFi, but it's around £30 cheaper. Sapphire has made full use of the display options offered by the H67 chipset which, when you add in Intel's QuickSync video transcoding technology built into the Sandy Bridge processors, makes the Pure Platinum H67 an ideal base for a tiny HTPC or media PC.
VITAL STATISTICS
Price £90
Web sapphiretech. corn
Form factor Mini-ITX
Socket I GAUSS
Chipset Intel H67
CPU Support 2nd gen Intel Core CPUs
Memory support Dual Channel DDR3
l/02x SATA 6Gbps. 2x SATA 3Gbps. 2x USB 3.0, 4x USB 2.0
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