Gigabyte G1 Sniper 5 motherboard review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

You can consider the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 to be a high-end class product. It's packed with options, but sure that does come at a certain price-tag of course. This motherboard will cost you your kidney at roughly 400 EUR. But it is an investment as you are about to find out. Below packaging and bundle. As you'll notice the motherboard is certainly a good looking motherboard alright. 

Included with the motherboard are the standards like SATA cables, manual, driver CD, IO rear backplate, cables and then some premium gear like:

• USB 3.0 bracket
• WIFI PCIe card and antenna
• On extra OPAMD
• SLI connectors
• IC extractor (to remove the OPAMD)
• Six SATA cables

The I/O back panel is filled to the bone. And look at that, that's a lot of gold being used. You will see two USB 2.0 ports with another six USB 3.0 ports. The motherboard features four PCIe x16 Gen 3.0 expansion slots (extra PLX chip provides additional lanes) and three PCIe x1 slots. A Creative Sound Core 3D chip is the audio solution. You'll get one Intel gigabit ethernet connector and we also spot a KillerNIC 10/100/1000 fast Ethernet (KillerNIC E2200). There is a single PS/2 combo port that can be used for either a keyboard or mouse, optical and coaxial SPDIF in/out port and six OFC (oxygen free) gold plated audio jacks. Audio is a big thing on the Sniper 5. But we'll get into more detail on that later in the article. Monitor connectors wise I get a smile on my face as well, not one but two HDMI (1.4a) connectors and one DisplayPort (1.2) connector. Just lovely.

The motherboard is just nice to look at really, I don't know about the green color though. It is so hard to combine with a PC build. You'll notice that the ATX form factor is a little bit bigger then usual, as such this is an XL-ATX form factor at 30.5cm x 26.4cm. Take good note of this as not all PC cases can fit an XL-ATX motherboard. The Sniper 5 - Z87 has 16 phase VRMs. The board comes with a diagnostic LEDs and voltage measurement points. 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 where NC = No Card

The board has one 8-pin power feed for the processor located on just behind he rear IO panel and as you can see is actively cooled on the VRM area. This heatsink in fact has fittings so you can connect it towards your liquid cooling loop as well. The Sniper 5 is built with UD5 grade quality (Ultra Durable) and Ultra Durable 5 technology amongst others embeds a 2 oz copper PCB, contains the highest-quality components and thus offers protection usage that can stand high temperatures and voltage fluctuations and even offers protection against static and excessive humidity. Interesting is a new series of components being used, a for example the voltage regulator circuitry on Ultra Durable 5 mainboards now make use of much more efficient IR3550 PowIRstage chips from International Rectifier Company.

In the lower right corner we spot all kinds of stuff going on. You will spot Voltage Check Points to accurately measure voltages for the CPU, integrated graphics, memory, and PCH. Four DIMM slots with support for dual-channel 1066/1333/1600 Mhz, however with XMP support you should be able to manage 1866*/2000*/2133*(OC), 2200/2400/2600/2667/2800 and yes even 3000 MHz. Gigabyte indicated that a maximum of 32GB of memory can be installed. Here as well we see a diagnostic POST LED, power and reset switches.