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Welcome to a much demanded unboxing.
This is from Gigabytes G1 killer series of boards. This is the G1 Sniper 5
gaming motherboard. Now, a lot of people
ask me what what the heck is a gaming motherboard. And I think Gigabyte had it
mostly right with the original G1 series board. So, that was the Assassin, the
Sniper, and the Gorilla. But, there were a few things that they got wrong. At the
time, it was a very strange platform to have a premium gaming board on LG 1366
when there was a more updated platform on a different socket. And also, they
were extremely expensive. Gigabyte has adjusted pricing down somewhat uh
compared to the original Assassin, but keep kept the premium features coming.
So, they've actually been improved over those older boards, even though the
Sniper 5 is not as expensive as the Assassin was. That isn't to say that
this is an inexpensive motherboard, because my friends, it is not. It is
extremely expensive. Let's go ahead and run through the accessories. Like, look
at this box of accessories. This is unbelievable. Four-way SLI bridge. 3-way
SLI bridge. Two-way SLI bridge. No
Crossfire bridge. That's okay. That should come with your uh your motherboard. USB cable for the I believe
this is for the uh Bluetooth guy. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Sorry. Crossfire
bridge. There you go. Nice black one. Matches your board. Next up, we've got
antenna for wireless. Next up, we've got
aha front three and a half inch USB 3 bay
device op amp upgrade kit. I'll show you this later. Okay, a nice sexy black IO
shield. One, two, three, six connectors. Cables, not connectors.
A manual. Another more different guide book. A manual for the wireless. And
finally, a Gigabyte sticker. Yes, one of
the most complete accessory kits ever.
And what I like about Gigabytes wireless implementation is it's just PCI Express.
They don't use some proprietary module. So, if you happen to buy yourself a
Sniper 5 and you don't want wireless on your gaming motherboard that has super
advanced onboard wired networking, you grab this thing, you throw it in another
machine like your Media Center PC, and boom, you've got Bluetooth and wireless
on that machine instead. I think it's a great value ad and more manufacturers
should move towards nonproprietary accessories with their boards as opposed
to stuff that you can only use only with
this board and and only this board. Okay. Anyway, uh so moving right along,
we've got black solid caps rated at 10,000 hours at 105°, which is unlikely
to happen in your computer. Please don't let your computer run at 105°. A
goldplated CPU socket. This is one of the few scenarios where gold plating
would actually matter because what's good about gold plating is that it's
malleable, meaning that it will last for more insertions and removals, which is
one of the problems with these LGA sockets. They're not actually rated for
very many of them. It has a two times copper PCB, so this is part of their
ultra durable five concept. Their glass fabric PCB that makes it more resistant
to humidity, as well as all IR digital
power phases. So, those are under there and unfortunately you can't really see
them, but you'll have to trust me. They're really good and particularly on
my Gigabyte board. So, I use an X79 UP5 on my personal system. No coil wine
whatsoever, which is definitely thumbs up. Other physical sort of I consider I
consider this a durable feature, but I don't think that's actually how they brand it. But some somewhere on here,
there are two physical there they are. Two physical UEFI BIOS chips, meaning
that you can switch between them. There's actually an LED indicator so you can see which one you're using. And I
want to move right along to the cooling solution. So this is one of the things
they were really talking about a lot at Computex. It uses I would consider this
a three option cooling solution. So it can be either completely passive. There
you go. See, you can see the heat pipe that connects it all the way down to the south bridge area here. Or you can run
an active fan to cool it. Gigabyte claims it's silent. I call bollocks on
that because all these little tiny fans have an irritating wine that drives me
absolutely crazy. So, I would leave that off. Or you can use the integrated
liquid cooling for maximum cooling. They
use 3/8 inch barbs. And while I would have preferred a G1 quarter socket like
ASUS has implemented on the Maximus 6 formula, the key difference between this
and the Maximus 6 formula is this is actually available right from the launch
of Haswell and well there that's this is
actually available right now. Although that will be coming soon. I would have preferred that, but I use 38 in tubes
anyway, so it wouldn't bother me personally that much. But if you prefer/
inch or quarter inch or you want to use nice angled compressions, then you're
pretty much out of luck on this one. It
also has nine integrated fan connectors,
of which seven of them are fully controllable, and one of them is kind of
special. So, there's the CPU fan connector right up here, as well as the
CPU optional one. This is optimized for things like hooking up a secondary pump
that you want to run at 100% all the time, or some large heat sinks that
actually have dual fans on them. You can plug that in and that's sort of an
auxiliary CPU fan header. Other than that, we've got a couple more here. Only
three pins, unfortunately. I'd like to see more manufacturers moving towards
entirely four pin PWM fan header designs. You got 1 2 3 four along the
bottom. Really like to see this because particularly with a lot of cases that
have basements, whether it's hard drive cooling fans or radiators or whatever
else down there, it's nice to have the option to plug everything into the
bottom of the board as well. And then there's one here at the back which is
again nice to see. So they've really put a lot of thought into where those fan
headers are as opposed to just uh you know putting them all up here as if
we're all running front five and a
quarter bay mounted fans. Like who does
that? Nobody does that. Anyway, moving right along. Uh gaming oriented
features. So, it supports 4-way Crossfire and 4-way SLI, which means
that using PLX chips and PCI Express lane splitters and all that stuff,
you're achieving at least PCIe 8X 2.0
per slot when you install four cards. However, it should be noted that those
splitters don't magically add more bandwidth to the platform and they can
actually introduce latency. So, I don't necessarily like the implementation, but
NVIDIA limits SLI compatible slots to
ones that operate at 8x or more for their reported speed. So, in order to
get four-way SLI working, that's what Gigabyte had to do. And to make it sort
of as gaming balls to the walls as they could, they wanted four-way crossfire
and four-way SLI support. You've also got three additional PCIe 1X slots.
Other gaming features, this right here, actually, we'll move into audio later.
So this right here, dual land implementation. So they've got a an
Intel nick as well as a Bigfoot Network.
So remember that is a Qualcomm solution now. Bigfoot Networks E2200, meaning
that you've got on the-ly packet prioritization for your gaming traffic
as well as a couple of other neat software implementation features that I
really like. For example, you could limit the bandwidth available for to a
particular application. So when I used to upload YouTube videos on my home
connection that wasn't as strong, it would just kill the internet connections
of everyone else in the house because it was completely saturating it. Then with
an with a Bigfoot nick, I could actually limit it to no only upload at this
speed. So everyone else was able to use the internet as well. So that's
something that I really like to see. And remember guys, the SATA ports are
colorcoordinated. So the six black ones are going to be off the Intel chipset
and those four gray ones are off of the Marll chipset. In terms of other
connectors on the board that are notable, we've got onboard power and
reset connectors as well as onboard V checkpoints and a post indicator LED. A
24 pin power connector I personally consider extremely handy. As well as
onboard USB 3. You can tell from the red background that that supports their
onoff charge feature which allows you to charge even high current draw Android or
iOS devices even while the computer is off. You've got auxiliary power. I
recommend using this if you're running three graphics cards or more. You've
also got your front panel connectors, an additional front USB3 connector,
although this one does not support onoff charge, as well as two USB 2 front panel
connectors and front audio, which leads us to audio. So this right here, this
little strip actually illuminates green when the board is powered on and
represents a physical segregation
between the rest of the board and the part of the PCB that handles audio. This
is the first time we've seen this feature and it kind of smacks of a bit
of a oh well they were doing it so we were doing it sort of thing especially with the LED illumination but it's a
good feature and I'm glad to see it implemented on more boards. Gigabyte has
taken their sort of their awesome onboard audio concept that they first
introduced with the G1 series and they've really upped the ante. So check
this out. They're using a Soundcore 3D quadcore processor for the sound
processor. How meaningful is it that it's quad core? Not at all. But what you
do get is you get Creative's software suite and you have hardware accelerating
it. So it couldn't be that bad, even if quad core doesn't necessarily mean
anything. You've also got audiograde capacitors here. And check that out.
swappable op amp on a motherboard. So,
that's what this little kit here was for. It actually includes uh a chip
puller as well as a second op amp. So, you can try out which one you like more.
What op amps do is they change the signature of the sound. They change the
the sort of I don't want to say quality, but they do change the qu the subjective
quality of the sound. So, you can not only try out the two that come with your
board, but you can swap in pretty much whatever you want and really change the
way that the sound operates. They've also got an amplifier that is capable of
powering up to 600 ohm headphones. However, if you're running headphones
like that, you shouldn't be using onboard audio, even if it's fantastic
onboard audio. And all of the audio connectors, look at those. Those are
sexy, are goldplated, which may actually matter for these connectors cuz you want
to make sure you have a nice solid connection. It is an analog connector,
particularly for digital connections like USB, it totally doesn't matter, but
this it might actually help, especially if you unplug and plug things in
repeatedly. And as far as convenience features go, they have their automated
overclocking as well as their Q flash utility that makes BIOS flashes a
breeze. And I think I've covered the other things that I wanted to say about
that. Let's move right along to Onboard
IO. Here we go. So, two USB 2.0 ports, a
PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. I still like to see these. Coaxial uh digital
audio out as well as optical digital audio out. Six USB 3.0 0 ports, dual
HDMI, DisplayPort, and 7.1 audio out.
The power connectors, including the 8 pin up here, as well as the 24 pin over
on the right hand edge, are in their optimal locations. And it should be
noted, this is a slightly wider board than normal. So, it's an EATX board, but
not a fully EATX board. So, it only uses the standard ATX mounting holes. Thank
you for checking out this unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to Lance Tech
Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And leave a
comment and let me know what you think, guys. Would you spend $400 on a
motherboard at this point? Or would you buy a cheaper board, maybe $150 board?
Gigabyte has some great $150 boards, throw a high-end sound card in it, throw
a high-end Nick card in it, and call that a day. Which do you actually think
is a better option?