Earlier today we swung by Gigabyte's office for an update ahead of Cebit and we were pleasantly surprised when the company told us that we could post pictures of its near final revision motherboards as of today. Due to the fact that Gigabyte has several new boards, we'll be breaking this down in a few articles so we can take a closer look at the various models, starting with the G1.Sniper 3.Sadly we can't write too much about the technology of these 7-series chipsets motherboards for Intel's third generation Core i processors as they're currently being called, although to make things easy we'll simply stick to Ivy Bridge as and when we refer to the CPU. That said, it's not as if we're looking at boring boards here, as although they might not be packed to the brim with shiny new features, there's enough here to go around.
As you have most likely already seen from the picture above, Gigabyte has really toned down the heatsink design on its gaming boards with the G1.Sniper 3 and we were told that they'd received a lot of criticism for its heatinks on the previous boards and as such decided to go for something a bit plainer. This looks a lot cleaner at least, although we're sure that some users won't be happy with this move either.So what's new? Well, let's start at the rear of the board – and no we're not talking about the I/O – as some of the biggest changes have taken place here. As you can see, the audio chip has changed, gone is the huge Creative 20K2 chip and in its place is the much smaller Sound Core3D which isn't much larger than your average audio chip. However, as with its previous models, Gigabyte has also added a headphone amp, Nichicon audio capacitors and some shielding to reduce any potential signal interference.
If you look closely in the bottom right hand corner of the picture you'll see another small chip underneath the audio shielding, this is the new Killer NIC from Qualcomm. Considering that the previous implementation used an FPGA, memory chips and a PHY from Broadcom, we'd say that this is a massive improvement in terms of PCB space requirements. The cost is apparently a lot lower as well, but just don't know how much cheaper it is. The downside both in terms of both of the new chips is the fact that some additional CPU processing time is needed, but this is unlikely to be a huge issue for anyone going for one of these boards.Due to some controversy over the Killer NICs, Gigabyte has added a second network controller – this time from Intel – to allow competitive gamers to use a standard network controller to avoid being called cheaters, although you can't see that chip in the picture above, but it's right above the first x16 PCI Express slot on the board.
Speaking of PCI Express slots, as you might've already have noticed, we're looking at no less than four x16 PCI Express 3.0 slots on this board and yes, they really are PCI Express 3.0 thanks to a new PLX bridge chip hiding under that little heatsink next to the CPU socket. This allows for the 16 lanes from the CPU to be split up into two by 16 or four by eight configurations, even though there technically isn't enough bandwidth, much like how Nvidia's old nForce 200 worked. Note that the board supports 4-way CrossFire, but it's limited to 3-way SLI as Nvidia won't license 4-way SLI for chipsets that don't have 32 lanes of native PCI Express bandwidth. The board also has two x1 PCI Express 2.0 slots and a single PCI slot.At the front of the board is yet another new addition to the G1 series of boards, an mSATA slot. This is for more than just SSD caching this time around, but we can't really go into the details about that as yet due to Intel's NDA's. That said, there is already some information online from IDF about what to expect and if you have a look at that, you should be able to work it out. The mSATA slot is sharing the same SATA interface as the sixth SATA port on the board, so if you use an mSATA drive, this port is disabled. Gigabyte has also added a pair of Marvell controllers for an additional four SATA 6Gbps ports.
Another new addition – and this is going to be a popular one – is improved overclocking features. Apparently a lot of customers complained that the G1 series didn't overclock all that well, so Gigabyte did something about it. Now we're told that the G1.Sniper 3 should be as good overclocker as any of Gigabyte's other boards and on top of that Gigabyte has added a POST80 debug LED, power measurement points and it has moved the power, reset and clear CMOS buttons to the top corner of the PCB. There's also a manual BIOS switch at the bottom of the board, close to where you connect the chassis headers and headers for four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports – more on that in a second – and two FireWire ports.
The rear I/O has of course also been changed, due to in no small way the change of chipset. Gigabyte has gone for full-on display connectivity support here with a DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI and D-sub connector. As you can see there's also a full set of USB 3.0 ports, but sadly Gigabyte decided to go with USB 3.0 hubs here, so the four Intel USB 3.0 ports are split up between the six rear ports and four front ports. The board also has a PS/2 port, the two aforementioned Ethernet ports and 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out via the Creative chip.
That's pretty much it for now; we'll go into some of the other new Gigabyte features in a separate article about some of the other boards. We should mention that Gigabyte has kitted out the G1.Sniper 3 with the same digital PWM controllers as it uses on the X79 series and there's the SATA type power connector at the front of the PCB for extra power to the PCI Express slots. For the rest, you'll have to wait until Intel allows for more detailed reviews which means that you'll have to wait until sometime in April according to the leaked launch schedule, unless something changes again.
Read more: Detailed hands on pictures of Gigabyte's G1.Sniper 3 by VR-Zone.com
Detailed hands on pictures of Gigabyte's G1.Sniper 3
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