by popular request this is my unboxing
of the Gigabyte G1 killer series of gaming motherboards
G1 assassin it has a really cool box for
starters it comes with a three-year warranty it is an LGA
1366 motherboard which means it's got full support for Intel's core i7 and
core i7 extreme processors on the LGA
1366 Intel x58 platform so don't go
trying to put your 1155 or 1156 CPU in
here it won't work okay other technologies that we're going to see
right off the bat here are xfi sound killer gaming networking okay so this is
probably the most featur rich gaming motherboard I have ever had the
opportunity to have a look at because Gigabyte has not only you know added
more USB ports and uh you know added
more bullet points to the back of well it's funny I should say bullet because
it's all about bullets uh this particular theme here but they've
actually included technologies that are highly relevant to Gamers and to me
better sound is one that most Gamers don't really seem to understand that
they need but they do including a
built-in front audio headphone amplifier that's huge that's enormous they've also
taken care to use higher quality capacitors on all of the sound or the
sound parts of the board so that you're going to have good filtering and so it's
not going to have a high noise to sound ratio or rather it will have a much
higher uh sound to noise ratio here we've got okay we've got an onboard
creative Sound Blaster xfi digital audio processor so all of that is included
let's see what else they've got to say about themselves super speed so the onboard Bigfoot killer e2100 game
networking platform so you guys have probably heard of the killer Nick we
actually did an episode about it this basically for all intents and purposes
has a dedicated killer Nick built onto it front access
control panel for two USB 3.0 ports and powered e SATA it includes support for
SATA 3 6 GB per second and USB 3 super
Shield here so this is actually just the heat sink design which looks pretty
sweet we're going to take the board out to show you guys that and it also has D
this is another feature that I've wanted to see on more gaming motherboards smart
fan connectors so those are going to allow
you to actually configure
sorry about that to actually configure how the fans connected to all of those
headers behave and I don't see it yet
but we're going to find out if those are four pin pwm connectors or if they are
standard three pin connectors okay the board itself no no
I'm not going to let you look at that yet first we're going to do accessories really quick here all right so we got a
poster this is the G1 killer gaming
motherboard so there's three different boards in this series the Assassin the sniper and the gorilla so they're all
featured here on the back of the board is a Target or the back of the board on
the back of the poster is a target next we have some stickers these are pretty
sweet stickers so we've got uh bullet stickers these are all individual
bullets so you can put them wherever you want we got some bullet holes we've also
got a G1 killer sticker okay oh we've
got some more look at that some more G1 killer one for each side of your case
more bullets more bullet holes next we have a users manual as as
well as a driver disc so don't use this download the latest from the Gigabyte
website Box contents okay nice
multilingual installation guide book just in case you need it next we have
actually let's look at this first so this is our front panel thing so we've
got quick boost which is an overclocking button esata/usb so that's a powered
eSATA and two USB 3.0 so that goes in a 5 and a/ qu in Bay next we've got a
Gigabyte sticker although that's not as cool as all those other stickers we saw
duby Home Theater sticker and we've got an IO Shield which is
conveniently labeled in terms of all the different connectors on the back we have
a three-way SLI bridge in gigabytes classic color scheme so you might want
to get yourself a black SLI bridge to go with this board if you are going to
install that as well as one crossfire bridge and one SLI bridge and finally we
have four SATA cables two are straight and two are right angle cables so I'm
going to go ahead and close this because it makes for a great
digicam that is digital camouflage not
digital camera uh digicam background for
the motherboard itself which I will eventually extract
from the packaging there we go we got a little
cover there and this is a huge board
like enormous okay here we go so the first thing you
know what let's go uh you know what I'm going to do my no I'm going to do my
standard approach to this so the first thing we find is the CPU socket here in
the middle of the board that is an LGA 1366 socket as I mentioned before over
here on the left we've got dual 8 Pin power connectors so you can provide a
ton that is to say a ton of juice to
that CPU socket without running into any power delivery instability let's count
the CPU power phases we got 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 oh hold
on give me a moment on this one so that is a 16 phase power design
around the CPU socket uh I think we also already talked about these so let's work
our way over to the RAM we have support for up to six dims in running in triple
channel so that is up to 24 GB of memory
on this particular board you can see here that the first ones we're going to
need to populate are the green ones and once you've populated all of the green
ones then you can begin to populate the black ones you've got a fair amount of
space around the CPU socket in general which is so important for a board like
this where the reality of it is nobody's using stock cooling on a motherboard of
this caliber so you need lots of space around for aftermarket cooling on the
right hand side of the board we've got our 24 pin connector in its ideal
location we also find moving on down the right that we have all of our SATA
connectivity so these six are going to be running at SATA 2 3 gbit per second
and these two are going to be running at SATA 3 6 gbit per second remember guys
the x58 platform and i1r do not natively
support SATA 3 so these are running off of a thirdparty chipset and that is why
you don't see more SATA 3 6 GB per second connectors on this board down at
the bottom we've got our front panel connectors we've got two front USB 2 two
front USB 3 headers and then we have a
an auxiliary Molex power connector our front audio in its ideal location this
is the first time I've seen front audio here on a Gigabyte motherboard uh
usually it's up here over by the audio chipset but you can actually see the
creative chipset being used is down here so maybe that's why they put it there in
terms of expansion here we go so we got
1 2 3 4 PCI Express 16x connectors none
of them or two of them are only wired for PC p e 8X so these two are wired for
full PCIe 16x and you can see from the spacing that those are the two you're
intended to use for two-way SLI and then if you were to run three-way SLI you're
probably going to go 1 two three and for four-way well I think the answer should
be quite obvious 1 2 3 4 additional connectors we have two PCI e1x one PCI
slot so if you are running dual cards in SLI you're going to be left with one PCI
e8x one PCI e1x and and a final PCI
e8x so here's all of the circuitry that
is involved in the builtin
Amplified um Amplified motherboard audio
okay we also have up here the killer
e2100 with its dedicated
RAM and so I think that's pretty much it for the overall features okay you know
what let's have a look at the cooling on this board because it's pretty sweet looking so the cooling on this board is
heat pipes with eat sinks as we've come to pretty much expect at this point from
any decently high-end motherboard we've also got some kind of neat uh Design
Elements here so you can see that this particular heat sink is the front of a
pistol okay so if you look at it from that angle you can see that's the site
from the other side you can see that's the barrel so that's kind of neat the
one over here at the top doesn't seem to have uh have that kind of a shape going
for it here we've got gaming motherboard we've got some LEDs built in here okay
our Northbridge heat sink is very very solid the reality of it is the x58
chipset doesn't require a ton of cooling so gigabytes not concerned about the
thermal efficiency of this design I mean it's more than adequate for cooling
everything we got here but they just want it to look sweet and they have
definitely achieved that now the self Bridge heat sink is just uh one slab of
metal and unlike some of the motherboards I've seen with huge cooling
heat sink Solutions on them in the recent past this one everything is
constructed entirely of metal so it's actually going to contribute to cooling
now this bottom one is uh is a a clip
right there so you can see it's actually got a bullet sticking out the top of it
and then on the bottom a convenient little warning just just for the special
uh purchasers out there heat sync not a weapon cannot be assembled as a firearm
so please put that out of your mind you
won't be doing it that won't be happening what else do I want to show oh
yeah another thing I wanted to show you guys is yes those controllable fan
connectors are all four pin pwm so there's one here actually here just back
out and I'll show you where they are so we got one here one here one here one
here and finally one here I also didn't point out this other auxiliary 4 pin
power connector now the reason these two are here is because all of the
motherboard power comes from the 24 bin connector traditionally these are just
for the CPU so that means if you install four graphics card by spec all of them
need to to pull a pretty decent amount of power out of the board and then they
only pull the extra that they need from those connectors at the back so if you
plug in four high power gpus and you don't use these auxiliary power
connectors you can actually burn the connectors here from so much current
running through them so that's what Gigabyte is trying to prevent on their
nice shiny high-end motherboard so we've got some more power delivery back here
and this is a nice touch I always like to see this proper screws attaching the
cooling solution from the motherboard rather than push pins cuz that's going
to make sure that if it gets hot or cold expends contracts no matter what happens
everything is going to stay properly
attached I'm just looking at the board I mean the overall color scheme of it I
think is great they're using their new matte black PCB which I think looks
better than anyone else's PCB out there the color scheme is phenomenal with a
nice gunmetal appearance to everything and then a couple of green and black
accents I think it looks absolutely outstanding it would actually be a great
pair for that uh half X NVIDIA Edition
right back there because this is not a standard siiz motherboard this is
actually a nine expansion slot motherboard so you can see there's two
missing slots up here and then seven expansion slots so this is longer than a
standard motherboard actually by a fairly substantial margin you know what give me a sec I'll go grab one so just
for comparison's sake here's the p67a ud4 next to the G1 assassin okay and you
can see that it is substantially shorter and and it is also substantially
narrower so I'm going to go ahead and put it on top and I'll get the cameraman
to come have a look at how much wider this board is so you can see the
mounting holes here and here there are your mounting holes well yeah there's
more board to the side of this one than there is on a standard sized ATX
motherboard so you're going to make sure you need to have a special case to
accommodate a board like this let's go ahead and have a look at the back panel
of connectors and I think that's pretty much it we've got two dedicated PS2
connectors I do still like to see these we've got coaxial audio out we have four
USB 2.0 four USB 3.0 gigabit Ethernet
powered by Bigfoot networks and then we have 7.1 audio as well as an additional
digital audio output and that is Optical thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the G1 assassin don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more
unboxings reviews and other computer videos