Gigabyte Killer G1.Assassin X58 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,503 words · ~12 min read
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by popular request this is my unboxing
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of the Gigabyte G1 killer series of gaming motherboards
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G1 assassin it has a really cool box for
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starters it comes with a three-year warranty it is an LGA
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1366 motherboard which means it's got full support for Intel's core i7 and
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core i7 extreme processors on the LGA
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1366 Intel x58 platform so don't go
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trying to put your 1155 or 1156 CPU in
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here it won't work okay other technologies that we're going to see
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right off the bat here are xfi sound killer gaming networking okay so this is
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probably the most featur rich gaming motherboard I have ever had the
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opportunity to have a look at because Gigabyte has not only you know added
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more USB ports and uh you know added
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more bullet points to the back of well it's funny I should say bullet because
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it's all about bullets uh this particular theme here but they've
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actually included technologies that are highly relevant to Gamers and to me
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better sound is one that most Gamers don't really seem to understand that
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they need but they do including a
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built-in front audio headphone amplifier that's huge that's enormous they've also
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taken care to use higher quality capacitors on all of the sound or the
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sound parts of the board so that you're going to have good filtering and so it's
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not going to have a high noise to sound ratio or rather it will have a much
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higher uh sound to noise ratio here we've got okay we've got an onboard
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creative Sound Blaster xfi digital audio processor so all of that is included
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let's see what else they've got to say about themselves super speed so the onboard Bigfoot killer e2100 game
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networking platform so you guys have probably heard of the killer Nick we
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actually did an episode about it this basically for all intents and purposes
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has a dedicated killer Nick built onto it front access
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control panel for two USB 3.0 ports and powered e SATA it includes support for
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SATA 3 6 GB per second and USB 3 super
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Shield here so this is actually just the heat sink design which looks pretty
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sweet we're going to take the board out to show you guys that and it also has D
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this is another feature that I've wanted to see on more gaming motherboards smart
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fan connectors so those are going to allow
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you to actually configure
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sorry about that to actually configure how the fans connected to all of those
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headers behave and I don't see it yet
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but we're going to find out if those are four pin pwm connectors or if they are
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standard three pin connectors okay the board itself no no
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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
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poster this is the G1 killer gaming
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motherboard so there's three different boards in this series the Assassin the sniper and the gorilla so they're all
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featured here on the back of the board is a Target or the back of the board on
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the back of the poster is a target next we have some stickers these are pretty
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sweet stickers so we've got uh bullet stickers these are all individual
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bullets so you can put them wherever you want we got some bullet holes we've also
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got a G1 killer sticker okay oh we've
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got some more look at that some more G1 killer one for each side of your case
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more bullets more bullet holes next we have a users manual as as
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well as a driver disc so don't use this download the latest from the Gigabyte
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website Box contents okay nice
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multilingual installation guide book just in case you need it next we have
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actually let's look at this first so this is our front panel thing so we've
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got quick boost which is an overclocking button esata/usb so that's a powered
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eSATA and two USB 3.0 so that goes in a 5 and a/ qu in Bay next we've got a
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Gigabyte sticker although that's not as cool as all those other stickers we saw
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duby Home Theater sticker and we've got an IO Shield which is
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conveniently labeled in terms of all the different connectors on the back we have
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a three-way SLI bridge in gigabytes classic color scheme so you might want
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to get yourself a black SLI bridge to go with this board if you are going to
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install that as well as one crossfire bridge and one SLI bridge and finally we
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have four SATA cables two are straight and two are right angle cables so I'm
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going to go ahead and close this because it makes for a great
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digicam that is digital camouflage not
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digital camera uh digicam background for
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the motherboard itself which I will eventually extract
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from the packaging there we go we got a little
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cover there and this is a huge board
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like enormous okay here we go so the first thing you
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know what let's go uh you know what I'm going to do my no I'm going to do my
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standard approach to this so the first thing we find is the CPU socket here in
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the middle of the board that is an LGA 1366 socket as I mentioned before over
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here on the left we've got dual 8 Pin power connectors so you can provide a
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ton that is to say a ton of juice to
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that CPU socket without running into any power delivery instability let's count
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the CPU power phases we got 1 2 3 4 5 6
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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 oh hold
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on give me a moment on this one so that is a 16 phase power design
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around the CPU socket uh I think we also already talked about these so let's work
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our way over to the RAM we have support for up to six dims in running in triple
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channel so that is up to 24 GB of memory
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on this particular board you can see here that the first ones we're going to
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need to populate are the green ones and once you've populated all of the green
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ones then you can begin to populate the black ones you've got a fair amount of
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space around the CPU socket in general which is so important for a board like
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this where the reality of it is nobody's using stock cooling on a motherboard of
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this caliber so you need lots of space around for aftermarket cooling on the
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right hand side of the board we've got our 24 pin connector in its ideal
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location we also find moving on down the right that we have all of our SATA
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connectivity so these six are going to be running at SATA 2 3 gbit per second
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and these two are going to be running at SATA 3 6 gbit per second remember guys
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the x58 platform and i1r do not natively
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support SATA 3 so these are running off of a thirdparty chipset and that is why
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you don't see more SATA 3 6 GB per second connectors on this board down at
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the bottom we've got our front panel connectors we've got two front USB 2 two
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front USB 3 headers and then we have a
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an auxiliary Molex power connector our front audio in its ideal location this
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is the first time I've seen front audio here on a Gigabyte motherboard uh
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usually it's up here over by the audio chipset but you can actually see the
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creative chipset being used is down here so maybe that's why they put it there in
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terms of expansion here we go so we got
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1 2 3 4 PCI Express 16x connectors none
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of them or two of them are only wired for PC p e 8X so these two are wired for
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full PCIe 16x and you can see from the spacing that those are the two you're
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intended to use for two-way SLI and then if you were to run three-way SLI you're
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probably going to go 1 two three and for four-way well I think the answer should
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be quite obvious 1 2 3 4 additional connectors we have two PCI e1x one PCI
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slot so if you are running dual cards in SLI you're going to be left with one PCI
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e8x one PCI e1x and and a final PCI
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e8x so here's all of the circuitry that
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is involved in the builtin
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Amplified um Amplified motherboard audio
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okay we also have up here the killer
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e2100 with its dedicated
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RAM and so I think that's pretty much it for the overall features okay you know
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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
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heat pipes with eat sinks as we've come to pretty much expect at this point from
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any decently high-end motherboard we've also got some kind of neat uh Design
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Elements here so you can see that this particular heat sink is the front of a
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pistol okay so if you look at it from that angle you can see that's the site
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from the other side you can see that's the barrel so that's kind of neat the
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one over here at the top doesn't seem to have uh have that kind of a shape going
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for it here we've got gaming motherboard we've got some LEDs built in here okay
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our Northbridge heat sink is very very solid the reality of it is the x58
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chipset doesn't require a ton of cooling so gigabytes not concerned about the
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thermal efficiency of this design I mean it's more than adequate for cooling
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everything we got here but they just want it to look sweet and they have
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definitely achieved that now the self Bridge heat sink is just uh one slab of
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metal and unlike some of the motherboards I've seen with huge cooling
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heat sink Solutions on them in the recent past this one everything is
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constructed entirely of metal so it's actually going to contribute to cooling
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now this bottom one is uh is a a clip
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right there so you can see it's actually got a bullet sticking out the top of it
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and then on the bottom a convenient little warning just just for the special
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uh purchasers out there heat sync not a weapon cannot be assembled as a firearm
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so please put that out of your mind you
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won't be doing it that won't be happening what else do I want to show oh
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yeah another thing I wanted to show you guys is yes those controllable fan
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connectors are all four pin pwm so there's one here actually here just back
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out and I'll show you where they are so we got one here one here one here one
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here and finally one here I also didn't point out this other auxiliary 4 pin
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power connector now the reason these two are here is because all of the
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motherboard power comes from the 24 bin connector traditionally these are just
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for the CPU so that means if you install four graphics card by spec all of them
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need to to pull a pretty decent amount of power out of the board and then they
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only pull the extra that they need from those connectors at the back so if you
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plug in four high power gpus and you don't use these auxiliary power
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connectors you can actually burn the connectors here from so much current
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running through them so that's what Gigabyte is trying to prevent on their
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nice shiny high-end motherboard so we've got some more power delivery back here
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and this is a nice touch I always like to see this proper screws attaching the
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cooling solution from the motherboard rather than push pins cuz that's going
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to make sure that if it gets hot or cold expends contracts no matter what happens
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everything is going to stay properly
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attached I'm just looking at the board I mean the overall color scheme of it I
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think is great they're using their new matte black PCB which I think looks
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better than anyone else's PCB out there the color scheme is phenomenal with a
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nice gunmetal appearance to everything and then a couple of green and black
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accents I think it looks absolutely outstanding it would actually be a great
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pair for that uh half X NVIDIA Edition
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right back there because this is not a standard siiz motherboard this is
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actually a nine expansion slot motherboard so you can see there's two
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missing slots up here and then seven expansion slots so this is longer than a
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standard motherboard actually by a fairly substantial margin you know what give me a sec I'll go grab one so just
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for comparison's sake here's the p67a ud4 next to the G1 assassin okay and you
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can see that it is substantially shorter and and it is also substantially
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narrower so I'm going to go ahead and put it on top and I'll get the cameraman
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to come have a look at how much wider this board is so you can see the
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mounting holes here and here there are your mounting holes well yeah there's
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more board to the side of this one than there is on a standard sized ATX
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motherboard so you're going to make sure you need to have a special case to
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accommodate a board like this let's go ahead and have a look at the back panel
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of connectors and I think that's pretty much it we've got two dedicated PS2
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connectors I do still like to see these we've got coaxial audio out we have four
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USB 2.0 four USB 3.0 gigabit Ethernet
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powered by Bigfoot networks and then we have 7.1 audio as well as an additional
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digital audio output and that is Optical thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the G1 assassin don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more
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