G1 Sniper 2 Review
MSRP: $359.99 USD
Avalibility: Early September (Limited Edition in USA/CAN)
I also have this review up with sections here.
If you want you can watch this video too:
Today I am very excited to bring you my latest review of the G1 Sniper 2, GIGABYTE’s new Z68 based G1 Killer series gaming board. The story begins back about a year ago around this time, GIGABYTE started brainstorming on ways to improve their products and hit new market segments that previously hadn’t been attended to. They asked gamers what they would want in a board, and even brought in one of the best overclockers (Hicookie) to help them develop new boards. They concluded that gamers and overclockers want very different things in a motherboard but end up buying the same boards, as they are the best built and have the most features. GIGABYTE set off to experiment with prototypes of gaming boards and overclocking boards to see if they could better target each niche market. First they released the G1 killer X58 series (which was late in the game for X58) and then the X58A-OC (which was way too late in the game). Now we all know the story about those boards, both series G1 and OC were plagued with really late release as well as the fact that Sandy Bridge made X58 look pretty puny. Now at that time it seemed like the general consensus was that users wanted these boards but with the LGA1155 chipset, and today that is exactly what GIGABYTE has brought to the table.
The G1 Sniper 2 bring us technologies that allow it to survive and keep pace with future generation processors, the case and point is Ivy Bridge, which is set to release next year, but use the same LGA1155 socket and chipsets. The major difference is that Ivy Bridge has a PCI-E 3.0 controller and it’s a 22nm chip. Well motherboard manufacturers have used the magic balls and looked into the future, and are now bringing out boards with PCI-E 3.0 capabilities. The G1 Sniper 2 is a perfect example of this, as it has native PCI-E 3.0 as well as full 22nm BIOS support, so this board is already 100% ready for Ivy Bridge.
There are other features in my opinion that also make this board a hardcore gaming motherboard. The best feature of this board in my opinion is the Creative CA20K2 Audio processor and 5 built in audio amplifiers, with a whole array of high quality audio capacitors and even an on-board EMI shield. Next there is the Bigfoot NPU, one of the most high-tech consumer NICs there is. The next feature is one I think all of GIGABYTE’s motherboards should entail and that is full control of every fan connector on the motherboard individually, which this motherboard has, along with 5 matching temperature sensors in same individual regions. On top of all that a gaming board of this caliber should have excellent heatsink and PCI-E spacing; meaning the CPU’s heatsink should clear the RAM DIMMs, and the GPU should have enough room to breathe. This board has all of those things and a few extras; a front panel with an auto OC button and USB 3.0, some unique looking heatsinks, and all around nice aesthetics.
So join me as we venture into the new G1 Sniper 2, GIGABYTE’s new G1 Killer. I will also compare against the old G1 Assassin and the Z68X-UD7-B3.
Introduction
Box + Accessories
Layout and Design
Audio and NIC + Testing
Deep look at ICs and Features
BIOS
Voltage Regulator Module Testing (LLC, Ripple, PWM Freq., and Power Testing)
Overclocking and Debugging Report and Test Setup
Benchmarks
Heatsink and LEDs
Conclusion
Box + Accessories
Front and back of the box look like an ammo box, also has a handle and nice explanation of features. It’s actually a very big box, here are some comparison to old G1 Assassin which was ATX-XL.
You see the Assassin’s box is a bit bigger.
Up close of the chipset and future Ivy Bridge support.
After you open the box you have a plethora of accessories and manuals, and even stickers.
A nice front panel, it has USB 3.0 and OC button, with an extra USB 2.0/eSATA connector as well.
Sin’s Take: A front panel like that actually will cost you $20-30, the UD7 also has one, but no OC button.
Four SATA6GB/s cables, driver CD, and HDMI to DVI connector.
Sin’s Take: Now you don’t actually need to use the HDMI output for D-MODE Virtu, its enabled by default after you install the Virtu software. I like how everything is nice and black to match everything else, no random blue cables
There are the stickers, there is also a poster underneath.
Sin’s Take: I like having the stickers, even if I don’t actually use them all, I used the clear GIGABTYE sticker, and the “G1-Killer” sticker on my thermos for LN2 OCing. The poster is double-sided, one side has bullet holes and the other is a typical G1 Killer 3 military guys-pointing-gun- at-you-type-thing.
Layout and Design
First I am going to show you the G1 Sniper 2’s actual size compared to a normal ATX board like the Z68X-UD7 and an ATX-XL board, because it’s a hybrid of both.
Shorter than ATX-XL.
But a bit wider than normal ATX. Now this still qualifies for normal ATX size, so it won’t be a problem fitting into your case.
The board has a busy looking PCB, its actually all black, no brown copper trace seep through, and you can see the heatsinks try to resemble a AR15 rifle.
Sin’s Take: It’s something you need to get used to, I initially didn’t know what to think of how they looked, but over the months I really go used to it, and actually like it. Apart from the gun clip as the PCH heatsink, it looks pretty normal. I like the LEDs in the main heatsink, even if it doesn’t actually cool anything directly. Also this board is very pleasing on these eyes in general, I think GIGABYTE did a great job with the aesthetics; of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
This is a different picture, just on its side.
I am going to show you how the socket spacing compares to the Z68X-UD7 which uses standard socket and DIMM spacing. The G1 Sniper 2 has its spacing augmented.
See Augmented.
Sin’s Take: They did a great job adding extra space to the DIMMs, I had no trouble with my DDR3 2133 RAM (PSC). I don’t have hypers so I don’t know how they will clock, but this is a gaming board, not a subzero OC board. The increased space between the CPU and DIMMs might slightly hurt memory overclocker or performance, but we will take a look at that to see if there is any truth to it.
The backpanel now:
OC button has a cap, and HDMI has a plug.
The memory area has no buttons around it, but there is plenty space to even change your RAM while a long GPU is in place.
Here we have 7(6 angled, 1 straight) SATA connectors ((3)Black= Intel SATA3G, (2)White=Intel SATA6G, and (2)Gray=Marvell SATA6G). We then have 2 fan connectors, OC button connector, front panel headers, clear CMOS header, TPM, COM, 3 USB 2.0 ports which are out of view, and one USB 3.0 port which is on the side of the board next to the SATA ports.
Sin’s Take: This is very important!!!!!! You see where they put the USB 3.0 connector (bottom of the picture) and the OC button one(white small lower left)? This is a HUGE improvement over the previous G1 Assassin. Before, on the Assassin, the OC button connector was right under the 3rd GPU slot, so when you did SLI the GPU would literally sit on the connector. The USB 3.0 connector is in the best place possible in my opinion for the board with a provided front panel, as that is less length to the cable, thus easier cable management, and better signal quality.
You have two PCI-E 16x slots; the second one is actually an 8X slot. You not only have triple slot spacing, but that first 1x PCI-E slot isn’t blocked by the heatsink. Two PCI slots were added extra with an extra chip, as it’s not native to this platform.
Sin’s Take: BRAVO!!!! GIGABYTE for not blocking the first 1x port, this is a big improvement over the UD7’s blocked first PCI-E 1X slot. I actually just checked again to make sure that is correct, it is NOT blocked! It is looking like this board really has been analyzed over and over and improved, as this is one of GIGABYTE’s best LGA1155 boards to date, and that is just by judging its layout and design.
Here is the audio, we actually have some sort of EMI shielding on this board opposed to the G1 Killer X58 series. Same number of capacitors from Nichicon and same exact parts. Performance is even better than expected, it got “excellent” on every RMAA test except frequency response.. I will show you guys everything there is to the audio on this board, from the power in to the audio out. Please just go below if you want to see it!
I also stripped the board nude for you if you want to see what is under the heatsinks.
Audio Design and Testing!
The Creative XF-I suite is also included, and it allows total user control. GIGABYTe went with the TOSLINK outputs to save space on the back panel, which is a good thing. They also went out of their way to use very high quality DACs and ADCs, which are found in some of the best Creative XF-I standalone PCI-E cards. The audio playback is really great, but there is no way to show you other than to run some tests. I have an oscilloscope but I felt that maybe users want to compare against other tests on the internet, so I used RMAA 5.5, which is basically a standard among review sites.
The capacitors are very high quality from Nichicon, here is a close up of the capacitors and the EMI shield:
Audio Testing:
For this we use RMAA 5.5 with a loop cable, to test recording and playback, I tested against the Z68X-UD7 with a Realtek ACL889, which is actually a good audio IC:
BigFoot LAN Testing:
The Bigfoot Killer e2100 sells for about $90 USD. It is a combination of the e2100 Network processing Unit (NPU) some 1GB of DDR2 memory, and a Marvell 88E1118R Physical Layer Device(PHY). Now you can’t control your network speed outside of your router, but you can control some characteristics from your router to your mouse, such as bypassing the windows network stack, and set application control priority, which is what the NPU does. The newest software actually allows the NPU to designate streams like videos and give them more priority so playback is smoother. It is a very nice design, but it requires very smooth power and many different voltages, which is why it has two separate phases and a bunch of LDOs.
Here we will test with AIDA32 Network Performance Benchmark. I also had tested before but, because of a lot of controversy over testing it correctly, I opted just to do this test. Now it’s a master/Slave test, you use two computers on the same network, and set one to master and one to slave and transfer data, its actually simple to setup.
Now it is important to note that we didn't run any ping tests, just a test that will show up intranet bandwidth, so while its a benchmark it doesn't give you the whole picture. The thing is i don't want to venture into that land because like I said there is a lot of networking stuff I am just not good at explaining.
Deep look at ICs and Features
This part is all about teaching readers how the motherboard works, and what ICs make it tick and tock. A motherboard is nothing but a compilation of ICs, copper, and some SMD components. We will take a look at those right now.
We will start with the Voltage Regulator Module:
Next we will look at what each component does:
So I hope that helps understand what they do.
It’s a 12 phase VRM, 8 for the CPU cores, 2 for the System Agent/Uncore, and 2 for the Internal GPU.
Sin’s Take:It might not seems like a lot compared to the 24 phases of the UD7, but it is a gaming board, and Sandy Bridge doesn’t require much power. Also the PWM controls are also there with 10 Level LLC (which work excellent). We will test in the VRM section, and then later I will test the UD7’s VRM for comparison.
Here are some very unique fan and temperature controls on this board
Thanks to GIGABYTE for making this review possible.
MSRP: $359.99 USD
Avalibility: Early September (Limited Edition in USA/CAN)
I also have this review up with sections here.
If you want you can watch this video too:
Today I am very excited to bring you my latest review of the G1 Sniper 2, GIGABYTE’s new Z68 based G1 Killer series gaming board. The story begins back about a year ago around this time, GIGABYTE started brainstorming on ways to improve their products and hit new market segments that previously hadn’t been attended to. They asked gamers what they would want in a board, and even brought in one of the best overclockers (Hicookie) to help them develop new boards. They concluded that gamers and overclockers want very different things in a motherboard but end up buying the same boards, as they are the best built and have the most features. GIGABYTE set off to experiment with prototypes of gaming boards and overclocking boards to see if they could better target each niche market. First they released the G1 killer X58 series (which was late in the game for X58) and then the X58A-OC (which was way too late in the game). Now we all know the story about those boards, both series G1 and OC were plagued with really late release as well as the fact that Sandy Bridge made X58 look pretty puny. Now at that time it seemed like the general consensus was that users wanted these boards but with the LGA1155 chipset, and today that is exactly what GIGABYTE has brought to the table.
The G1 Sniper 2 bring us technologies that allow it to survive and keep pace with future generation processors, the case and point is Ivy Bridge, which is set to release next year, but use the same LGA1155 socket and chipsets. The major difference is that Ivy Bridge has a PCI-E 3.0 controller and it’s a 22nm chip. Well motherboard manufacturers have used the magic balls and looked into the future, and are now bringing out boards with PCI-E 3.0 capabilities. The G1 Sniper 2 is a perfect example of this, as it has native PCI-E 3.0 as well as full 22nm BIOS support, so this board is already 100% ready for Ivy Bridge.
There are other features in my opinion that also make this board a hardcore gaming motherboard. The best feature of this board in my opinion is the Creative CA20K2 Audio processor and 5 built in audio amplifiers, with a whole array of high quality audio capacitors and even an on-board EMI shield. Next there is the Bigfoot NPU, one of the most high-tech consumer NICs there is. The next feature is one I think all of GIGABYTE’s motherboards should entail and that is full control of every fan connector on the motherboard individually, which this motherboard has, along with 5 matching temperature sensors in same individual regions. On top of all that a gaming board of this caliber should have excellent heatsink and PCI-E spacing; meaning the CPU’s heatsink should clear the RAM DIMMs, and the GPU should have enough room to breathe. This board has all of those things and a few extras; a front panel with an auto OC button and USB 3.0, some unique looking heatsinks, and all around nice aesthetics.
So join me as we venture into the new G1 Sniper 2, GIGABYTE’s new G1 Killer. I will also compare against the old G1 Assassin and the Z68X-UD7-B3.
Introduction
Box + Accessories
Layout and Design
Audio and NIC + Testing
Deep look at ICs and Features
BIOS
Voltage Regulator Module Testing (LLC, Ripple, PWM Freq., and Power Testing)
Overclocking and Debugging Report and Test Setup
Benchmarks
Heatsink and LEDs
Conclusion
Box + Accessories
Front and back of the box look like an ammo box, also has a handle and nice explanation of features. It’s actually a very big box, here are some comparison to old G1 Assassin which was ATX-XL.
You see the Assassin’s box is a bit bigger.
Up close of the chipset and future Ivy Bridge support.
After you open the box you have a plethora of accessories and manuals, and even stickers.
A nice front panel, it has USB 3.0 and OC button, with an extra USB 2.0/eSATA connector as well.
Sin’s Take: A front panel like that actually will cost you $20-30, the UD7 also has one, but no OC button.
Four SATA6GB/s cables, driver CD, and HDMI to DVI connector.
Sin’s Take: Now you don’t actually need to use the HDMI output for D-MODE Virtu, its enabled by default after you install the Virtu software. I like how everything is nice and black to match everything else, no random blue cables
There are the stickers, there is also a poster underneath.
Sin’s Take: I like having the stickers, even if I don’t actually use them all, I used the clear GIGABTYE sticker, and the “G1-Killer” sticker on my thermos for LN2 OCing. The poster is double-sided, one side has bullet holes and the other is a typical G1 Killer 3 military guys-pointing-gun- at-you-type-thing.
Layout and Design
First I am going to show you the G1 Sniper 2’s actual size compared to a normal ATX board like the Z68X-UD7 and an ATX-XL board, because it’s a hybrid of both.
Shorter than ATX-XL.
But a bit wider than normal ATX. Now this still qualifies for normal ATX size, so it won’t be a problem fitting into your case.
The board has a busy looking PCB, its actually all black, no brown copper trace seep through, and you can see the heatsinks try to resemble a AR15 rifle.
Sin’s Take: It’s something you need to get used to, I initially didn’t know what to think of how they looked, but over the months I really go used to it, and actually like it. Apart from the gun clip as the PCH heatsink, it looks pretty normal. I like the LEDs in the main heatsink, even if it doesn’t actually cool anything directly. Also this board is very pleasing on these eyes in general, I think GIGABYTE did a great job with the aesthetics; of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
This is a different picture, just on its side.
I am going to show you how the socket spacing compares to the Z68X-UD7 which uses standard socket and DIMM spacing. The G1 Sniper 2 has its spacing augmented.
See Augmented.
Sin’s Take: They did a great job adding extra space to the DIMMs, I had no trouble with my DDR3 2133 RAM (PSC). I don’t have hypers so I don’t know how they will clock, but this is a gaming board, not a subzero OC board. The increased space between the CPU and DIMMs might slightly hurt memory overclocker or performance, but we will take a look at that to see if there is any truth to it.
The backpanel now:
OC button has a cap, and HDMI has a plug.
The memory area has no buttons around it, but there is plenty space to even change your RAM while a long GPU is in place.
Here we have 7(6 angled, 1 straight) SATA connectors ((3)Black= Intel SATA3G, (2)White=Intel SATA6G, and (2)Gray=Marvell SATA6G). We then have 2 fan connectors, OC button connector, front panel headers, clear CMOS header, TPM, COM, 3 USB 2.0 ports which are out of view, and one USB 3.0 port which is on the side of the board next to the SATA ports.
Sin’s Take: This is very important!!!!!! You see where they put the USB 3.0 connector (bottom of the picture) and the OC button one(white small lower left)? This is a HUGE improvement over the previous G1 Assassin. Before, on the Assassin, the OC button connector was right under the 3rd GPU slot, so when you did SLI the GPU would literally sit on the connector. The USB 3.0 connector is in the best place possible in my opinion for the board with a provided front panel, as that is less length to the cable, thus easier cable management, and better signal quality.
You have two PCI-E 16x slots; the second one is actually an 8X slot. You not only have triple slot spacing, but that first 1x PCI-E slot isn’t blocked by the heatsink. Two PCI slots were added extra with an extra chip, as it’s not native to this platform.
Sin’s Take: BRAVO!!!! GIGABYTE for not blocking the first 1x port, this is a big improvement over the UD7’s blocked first PCI-E 1X slot. I actually just checked again to make sure that is correct, it is NOT blocked! It is looking like this board really has been analyzed over and over and improved, as this is one of GIGABYTE’s best LGA1155 boards to date, and that is just by judging its layout and design.
Here is the audio, we actually have some sort of EMI shielding on this board opposed to the G1 Killer X58 series. Same number of capacitors from Nichicon and same exact parts. Performance is even better than expected, it got “excellent” on every RMAA test except frequency response.. I will show you guys everything there is to the audio on this board, from the power in to the audio out. Please just go below if you want to see it!
I also stripped the board nude for you if you want to see what is under the heatsinks.
Audio Design and Testing!
The Creative XF-I suite is also included, and it allows total user control. GIGABYTe went with the TOSLINK outputs to save space on the back panel, which is a good thing. They also went out of their way to use very high quality DACs and ADCs, which are found in some of the best Creative XF-I standalone PCI-E cards. The audio playback is really great, but there is no way to show you other than to run some tests. I have an oscilloscope but I felt that maybe users want to compare against other tests on the internet, so I used RMAA 5.5, which is basically a standard among review sites.
The capacitors are very high quality from Nichicon, here is a close up of the capacitors and the EMI shield:
Audio Testing:
For this we use RMAA 5.5 with a loop cable, to test recording and playback, I tested against the Z68X-UD7 with a Realtek ACL889, which is actually a good audio IC:
BigFoot LAN Testing:
The Bigfoot Killer e2100 sells for about $90 USD. It is a combination of the e2100 Network processing Unit (NPU) some 1GB of DDR2 memory, and a Marvell 88E1118R Physical Layer Device(PHY). Now you can’t control your network speed outside of your router, but you can control some characteristics from your router to your mouse, such as bypassing the windows network stack, and set application control priority, which is what the NPU does. The newest software actually allows the NPU to designate streams like videos and give them more priority so playback is smoother. It is a very nice design, but it requires very smooth power and many different voltages, which is why it has two separate phases and a bunch of LDOs.
Here we will test with AIDA32 Network Performance Benchmark. I also had tested before but, because of a lot of controversy over testing it correctly, I opted just to do this test. Now it’s a master/Slave test, you use two computers on the same network, and set one to master and one to slave and transfer data, its actually simple to setup.
Now it is important to note that we didn't run any ping tests, just a test that will show up intranet bandwidth, so while its a benchmark it doesn't give you the whole picture. The thing is i don't want to venture into that land because like I said there is a lot of networking stuff I am just not good at explaining.
Deep look at ICs and Features
This part is all about teaching readers how the motherboard works, and what ICs make it tick and tock. A motherboard is nothing but a compilation of ICs, copper, and some SMD components. We will take a look at those right now.
We will start with the Voltage Regulator Module:
Next we will look at what each component does:
So I hope that helps understand what they do.
It’s a 12 phase VRM, 8 for the CPU cores, 2 for the System Agent/Uncore, and 2 for the Internal GPU.
Sin’s Take:It might not seems like a lot compared to the 24 phases of the UD7, but it is a gaming board, and Sandy Bridge doesn’t require much power. Also the PWM controls are also there with 10 Level LLC (which work excellent). We will test in the VRM section, and then later I will test the UD7’s VRM for comparison.
Here are some very unique fan and temperature controls on this board
Thanks to GIGABYTE for making this review possible.
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