Sapphire Pure Platinum H67 review

The latest manufacturer to join the Sandy Bridge/ITX revolution is Sapphire, with its Pure Platinum H67 based around Intel's H67 chipset.

When Intel was gazing into its crystal ball to get an idea of the impact its Sandy Bridge technology might make on the market, there's a fair chance it didn't see the second – or at least the third – coming of an old motherboard format back into the limelight.

Since its inception back in 2001, every now and then the ITX motherboard format makes an appearance, with some brave manufacturer hoping that this will be the time the format takes off.

But with the coming of Sandy Bridge, at last it seems the format's time to bask in the sun has arrived.

With the tiny platform now being able to offer performance that previous generations of boards could only dream about, nearly every motherboard manufacturer worth its salt has at least one Sandy Bridge based ITX board in their lineup.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum H67 isn't quite as well featured as Zotac's H67-ITX Wi-Fi – you only get two SATA 3Gbps ports on the Sapphire board as compared to the four Zotac supply – but both have twin SATA 6Gbps ports. Sapphire's board also misses out on the Wi-Fi module that comes with the Zotac board.

It still has the mini PCIe slot, which sits under slung beneath the board, but it does have Bluetooth built in and, in place of the Zotac's Wi-Fi 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.

The rest of the ports are pretty standard, apart from the antennae for the Atheros AR3011 Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR module. That would be standard for a microATX or lower-mainstream, full-sized ATX board, let alone a wee thing like the Pure Platinum H67.

There are also four USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit LAN, the audio block for the 7.1 integrated audio and a separate optical S/PDIF out port.