Gigabyte G1.Sniper A88X Motherboard
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,505 words · ~7 min read
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with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts all right so
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this is about as expensive as it gets for a motherboard that's intended for a
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platform that's all about the performance of its onboard Graphics the
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question then is how can you justify it when motherboards all pretty much
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perform the same if you look at purey puu or video card benchmarks well for
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one thing it looks better with Gigabyte signature matte black PCB and vibrant
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green accent G1 series color scheme and
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for another it has more features than most other fm2 plus boards some that on
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the Intel motherboard side of things you'd have to spend another 40 bucks on
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a G1 sniper z5s if you wanted to get
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more on those later though first we'll do what's included in the box and a
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physical tour of the board so inside you find an IO shield for cables and a
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manual that's it for the board at its
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heart we find an fm2 plus socket with support for the latest AMD cavar apus
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and last generation fm2 based apus as
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well the vrm power delivery and cooling setup around it is fairly mundane but
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AMD's latest CPUs aren't the power Hogs
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that the old ones were so it's not a concern at all speaking of power the 8
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Pin and 24 pin connectors are in their ideal location for easy Cable Management
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in most cases and over here we've got four slots for dual Channel DDR3 RAM
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with support for up to 2400 MHz RAM and
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with support for or XMP memory profiles
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the board actually supports up to 64 gigs of RAM with theoretical 16 gig
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unbuffered dims front USB 3 is over on
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the right hand Edge the year's a self Bridge heat SN down here that covers up
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your chipset and you've got SATA 3 ports kind of positioned around it in a
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location that I guess is not really ideal but it's not bad either because
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all the ones coming straight out of the board are going to be out of the way of a dual slot graphics card in the bottom
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slot and next to it you've only got PCI slots most PCI cards aren't that long
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we've also got Gigabyte signature dual BIOS down here with two physical chips
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so even if you brick it in the middle of a flash you are still good to go and
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finally you've got two front usb2 connectors to go along with that front
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USB 3 I'd say the PCI slot layout is actually very good it's Crossfire
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compatible but not SLI this board is and you can install up to two dual slot
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graphics cards with two PCIe 1X slots
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and one PCI slot left which is a great mix for what I would call like an
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entry-level performance oriented board the fan headers are located here here
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here and here I'm a little bit disappointed that we don't have any down
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at the bottom of the board but it's your mileage may vary depending on the layout
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of your case and now I think we got to get into the sound implementation which
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actually takes up most of the space on gigabytes webpage for this board it
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features a realtech ALC 898 codec which
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is quite similar to the alc889 that Tom's Hardware tested against a $2,000
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DAC and found it to perform quite similarly so we can't criticize their
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choice of components here they've also included an isolated PCB section which
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has become a popular method of reducing electrical interference among motherboard manufacturers and it's also
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designed to reduce interference with a gold shield over the audio processor I
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haven't seen it demonstrated that these type of shields provide a tangible
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benefit but hey it's there looks cool couldn't be bad so there you go stuff
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you're more likely to notice in actual use is gigabytes use of nichon pro audio
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capacitors they're onboard gain switches that allow you to select either a 2 and
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1/2x or 6X amplification mode and their
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upgradable opamp socket most people will never use this last feature and it's not
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something I really even really recommend messing around with but if you want to
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try out different op amps and see how they color the output sound then you've
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got that flexibility moving up to the rear iio we find the goldplated 7.1
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audio ports please note this doesn't improve audio quality directly but it
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can make the ports last longer over time after many insertions and the last audio
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Centric feature on the board which isn't directly related to the onboard audio
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but may be important for folks using external Dack such as an odac or a file
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E10 and that's a special USB 2 connector
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right here on the back with gold plating which in in itself doesn't matter at all
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but more importantly a separate power source that's designed to minimize power
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flu fluctuations fluctuations on the
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back we've also got the usual IO so we've got four USB 2.0 ports in addition
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to the audio one 2 USB 3.0 ports PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port VGA DVI HDMI
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gigabit Ethernet and of course the audio ports that I mentioned before including
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optical audio out it should be noted that onboard Graphics is something
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special on AMD's latest platform and over its HDMI 1.48 connector with a
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cavar Apu installed the board will support 4K output but only at 30 HZ
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which is still great if you're looking to set up a media Playback box for your 4K TV and the last interesting point
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about the board before we get into our overclocked performance test are the
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things that unfortunately I can't validate but what I will say is that if
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gigabytes Ultra durable 4 plus design does improve the board's resiliency
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against high humidity and electrostatic discharge shocks then that's something
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you would want on your board so now without further Ado I'm going to hand
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this off to Luke who took this board for a spin to give us an idea of what we can
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achieve by overclocking both the CPU and GPU component of a cavar Apu can we
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justify a gaming Centric board on this value optimized platform I guess we'll
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find out all right guys if we're if we're reviewing a graphics card we
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review it overclocked and we recommend that everyone overclocks their graphics card on the way show we talked about
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this a lot and everything but we're not that aggressive about it with CPUs and
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there's a reason for that but with this what we're overclocking is an APU it is
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both graphics and processor in the same thing and we highly suggest overclocking
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it and that is why these numbers are going to be overclocked we're running
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the system at 4.4 GHz on the processor
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side on the graphic side it's running at 900 MHz and we applied 1.52 5 volts to
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it to get these numbers I could probably get that voltage number lower just I'm
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preparing for the W show right now and don't have a ton of time as you can see
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with our star swarm and benchmarks there's a really big Improvement due to
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being able to overclock the graphics core that much it's a really big really
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big jump over the stock numbers and then in Thief when we're overclocking memory
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which is actually completely different you see huge jumps again if you combine
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those two it's even more overclocking on this platform is very important if
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you're buying a cavar Apu I almost said CPU there if you're buying a cavar Apu
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you need to overclock your platform so that was fun guys like and share this
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video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment on the
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