Introduction
Gigabyte Intel 8 Series Platforms
In this review we test and benchmark the Gigabyte.G1 Sniper 5 motherboard. This Z87 gaming themed mainboard is seated in the high-end range of Gigabyte's multiple Z87 motherboards releases. Pop on an Intel 22nm Haswell processor and you will notice that the G1.Sniper 5 is extremely feature rich and has great overclock potential. Oh and of course you'lll spot the black/green color schema again. Have a look at this 19 page review :)
If you have just read the MSI MPower Z87 review yeah... you are going to see a lot of similarities alright. The Gigabyte.G1 Sniper 5 motherboards as tested today comes chucked full with extra features and overclock potential, it has the latest Killer E2200 chip. This motherboard comes even with a very impressive 16-phase VRM power design.
Following the Ultra Durable 5 design, it is equipped with ferrite-core chokes, International Rectifier PowIRstage components as seen in the last generation motherboards as well. This is the first board that we see that has driver-MOSFETs on-board that are cooled by an active fan-heatsink combo. And the heatsink can be connected to a liquid cooling loop if you like to do so.
You'll spot many PCIe x16 slots indicating a PLX PEX8747 48-lane PCI-Express 3.0 bridge chip embedded. This chip offer the option to go for 4-way SLI/CrossFireX which this motherboards supports. That means x16/NC/x16/NC or x16/NC/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x16/NC or x8/x8/x8/x8. Oh and is 10 SATA 6 GBps ports enough for ya? Or what about a KillerNIC integrated LAN and another extra Intel NIC. Just like the competition offers, Gigabyte as well includes a WIFI controller. That Killer NIC BTW is a dedicated IC that should ensure low PING times for online gamers by prioritizing your band-with whilst giving you the option to monitor your network traffic.
The overclockers amongst you will be happy as well, the Z87 Gigabyte.G1 Sniper 5 is just made for it. In fact in the BIOS it even has a preset that overclocked our processor to 4700 Mhz on all four cores of the Core i7 4770K. Very nice. Just like MSI, Gigtabyte integrated and isolated the audio circuitr. it entails a built-in 600Ω headphone amplifier allows you to use studio-grade headgear and get the most amazing sound quality out of your gaming PC.
Gigabyte gave all audio connectors a gold treatement, they power audio with a Creative Sound Core3D chip and even offers you to swap out OPAMPS. We'll show you that later on in the article though.
There's way more going on with connectors and interfaces thoughy, what about ten USB 3.0 ports (six on the rear panel, four by headers), dual-HDMI and DisplayPort display outputs, and yes we like it, a legacy PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo connector. Anyway, have a peek at this spectacular looking and feature rich motherboard, its all new design and then let's fire up this review.
