Gigabyte G1.Sniper ATX Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,773 words · ~8 min read
0:00
so I noticed something interesting while I was looking at the G1 sniper box
0:04
preparing to do my unboxing check this out the boxes are actually patterned
0:11
identically oh here it's probably easier if I stack them save for the
0:15
color so every little like Mark is
0:20
exactly the same on both boxes see like this Mark and this Mark see so it's just
0:25
a color difference however there is more difference between these two
0:29
motherboards than just the color so we
0:32
are going to be doing an unboxing of the G1 sniper we've already done the G1
0:37
assassin and let's have a look at what
0:40
is special about this member of the Gigabyte G1 gaming Series so it has a
0:45
three-year warranty which we've come to expect from Gigabyte in the US and
0:49
Canada it has extreme Fidelity x52 or XF
0:53
rather powered audio okay it supports the latest Intel Core i7 processors on
0:59
the LG 1366 platform that includes the 990x extreme Edition we've got powered
1:05
by creative audio including uh onboard
1:08
amplification as well as a killer e2100 networking solution okay let's
1:13
move around to the back where there's a bunch of stuff that really we're going
1:17
to get more into as we look at the board itself so let's open up the box here
1:21
where we find some Digi Cam
1:25
and some flatulence okay
1:30
and there's the board itself we're not going to look too closely at that yet we
1:34
are going to check out the accessories so first thing we got here
1:40
is three dudes who are G1 Killers we
1:45
have the I believe it's the Assassin the
1:48
gorilla and the sniper okay then on the back we have a target with some bullet
1:52
holes conveniently already in it next we have stickers
1:59
bullets bullet holes skull with flames
2:02
coming out of his eyes and a knife and more bullets more bullet holes and some
2:07
G1 see these these two would actually probably look pretty cool on on your
2:11
case the rest of them I don't know you might just look like you live in Siri
2:15
and you drive a truck okay here we go users manual
2:19
including a chipsets and utilities DVD
2:23
throw it away download the latest off the Gigabyte website multilingual
2:26
installation guide book okay we've got
2:29
an IO Shield which is not colorcoded but it is black so it looks sweet we've also
2:35
got a Gigabyte sticker yeah that sticker sucks compared to the other ones sry
2:39
Gigabyte then we have Dolby Digital home theater logo all right we've got a front
2:44
panel USB 3 which is pretty nice okay using an
2:48
internal header since most cases don't have front USB 3 uh that's that's a
2:53
pretty good feature to have so it just mounts in a 3 and 1/2 in Bay all right
2:57
we've got an SLI Bridge freeway s
3:01
ibridge and we've got four SATA cables
3:05
so two of them are right angle and two of them are straight okay I'm just going
3:09
to put this back in here bear with me while I do some reboxing to go with my
3:17
unboxing and there we go and that will
3:20
give me a convenient place to put the motherboard while we talk about that
3:25
okay so the motherboard the biggest difference that
3:29
I can see between the G1 assassin and
3:34
the G1 sniper at first glance anyhow is
3:38
the form factor so the G1 assassin uses
3:42
that XL ATX form factor which has nine
3:47
expansion slots and only fits in a handful of cases whereas the G1 assassin
3:52
seems to have a pretty similar feature set but fits in a standard ATX case oh
3:59
it also only has six expansion slots compared to the seven expansion slots on
4:04
the Assassin afforded by the longer form
4:07
factor so let's do sort of my standard Spiel where we start in the Middle where
4:11
we've got our LGA 1366 socket supporting
4:14
core i7 core i7 extreme processors we've got our four pin power connector up here
4:19
in its ideal location we've got six
4:23
memory slots supporting triple Channel DDR3 memory we've got our 24 pin
4:28
connector and its ideal location along the right hand Edge we have six SATA 2 3
4:34
gbit per second ports and two SATA 3 6
4:37
gbit per second ports and then we've got
4:40
all of our front panel connectors uh one of the things that Gigabyte has fixed
4:45
about their G1 series boards as we move along we got USB 2 oh wow three USB 2s
4:50
One USB 3 front header and then we've also got our audio header look at that
4:55
Gigabyte is putting their audio header in the correct location at the very
4:58
bottom left of the board unlike some of their previous boards where it's here
5:03
and that's very difficult to get a front panel cable over to all right we've also
5:08
got our expansion slots so we have 1 2 3 PCI e6x we have two PCI e1x and one PCI
5:16
based on the PCI or based on the SLI
5:20
bridge I saw included it looks like the full speed PCIe 16x slots are actually
5:25
going to be these two and this last one runs at 8X as is standard on x58 boards
5:31
it's going to be 16 16 and 8 okay we've
5:35
got cooling let's talk cooling for a minute here so this boys and girls is
5:40
not a weapon it is a heat sink and it cannot be assembled as a firearm I have
5:44
been notified that this is not a clip
5:48
based on my uh G1 assassin unboxing
5:51
actually this is a magazine so my bad I
5:54
don't know why crazy Russian keeps moving the camera around so much hold it
5:58
still okay then we've we've got our North Bridge heat sink not like that
6:03
okay which has LED lights on it which look cool it also says gaming
6:06
motherboard on it and finally we have our mosfet heat sink which I think is
6:10
actually the coolest one because it's the barrel of a gun check that out so
6:15
you got your sight there you got your Barrel which will have a bullet coming
6:18
out of it probably not cuz it's a heat sink not a weapon bear that in mind
6:22
folks okay uh you know what let's not do the back iio yet let's talk about the
6:26
special features that make G1 special so
6:29
here we have all of the circuitry that is dedicated to the onboard sound onboard
6:34
sound is something that I really feel has gotten ignored while we are
6:39
innovating in so many other ways on motherboards so this has a built-in
6:44
amplifier which means that you can run even high impedance headphones on this
6:48
motherboard and still get a satisfactory listening experience okay it also has as
6:52
I said before dedicated circuitry for the onboard sound that's going to
6:56
provide you with anytime you have better quality components being used for sound
7:00
you're going to get a better overall listening experience better signal deloise ratio all of that good stuff and
7:06
up here we have the killer which actually has dedicated RAM as a cache
7:12
and it is capable of according to
7:15
Bigfoot networks reducing your overall latency and that is a good thing no I
7:19
don't care about that okay uh what else do we have on here to talk about oh yeah
7:23
fan control okay so we got one two just back out and I'll point at them 1 2 3
7:29
three four and I'm sure there's one more
7:33
five uh fan fan headers those are all four pin pwm fan headers and they are
7:38
conveniently located where you actually might need them unlike some motherboards
7:42
so here's your back fan here's your CPU fan here's one two three that are kind
7:47
of at the Front Bottom so that should be pretty handy and pretty usable compared
7:52
to some of the stuff I've seen in the past on the back of the motherboard you can clearly see the matte black PCB
7:57
which I have not harped on yet in this video although I do talk about it every
8:01
time I see one because matte black pcbs are the shizzel everything should have a
8:05
matte black PCB period okay we also have
8:09
screws on the back which I'd really like to see not only screws but isolated
8:14
screws so they've got little washers little plastic washers that will prevent
8:17
those from ever shorting out and causing a problem with this motherboard the fact
8:21
that we're using screws also means that cheap plastic push pins can't pop out
8:26
and accidentally make it so that your mosfet who or your North Bridge cooler
8:30
isn't making proper contact anymore and not cooling something properly so that
8:35
is just one of those nice little touches that I do like to see finally let's have
8:39
a look at the back panel where we have two PS2 ports we've got coaxial audio
8:44
out we have an OC switch wo okay so you
8:49
know what give me a moment I'm going to find out what that does just wanted to
8:52
correct myself really quick cuz I think I I okay clarify myself really quick so
8:57
when you're running with two graphics cards these are 6 16x 16x but it's not
9:01
actually 1668 it's when you're running with three
9:05
graphics cards it's going to be 168 and 8 okay guys so I'm clarifying that 1616
9:11
or 1688 so this one is capable of doing
9:14
either depending on the configuration so this OC labeled switch at the back is
9:19
according to the
9:22
manual an OC button okay press this
9:26
button to overclock your CPU to turn to the defaults press this button again
9:31
pretty self-explanatory all right next we have two ESAT ports we have four USB
9:38
2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports a gigabit
9:43
Ethernet powered by killer 5.1 audio as
9:46
well as optical audio
9:51
out hold on my bad 7.1 all right thanks guys for
9:57
checking out this unboxing of the G1
10:01
killer sniper don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more unboxings
10:06
reviews and other videos