Gadgetory

by popular request this is my unboxing of the gigabyte g1 killer series of gaming motherboards g1 assassin it has a really cool box for starters it comes with a three year warranty it is an LGA 1366 motherboard which means it's got full support for Intel's Core i7 and core i7 extreme processors on the LGA 1366 Intel x58 platform so don't go trying to put your 1155 for 1156 CPU in here it won't work ok other technologies that we're gonna see right off the bat here are x5 sound killer gaming networking ok so this is probably the most feature-rich gaming motherboard I have ever had the opportunity to have a look at because gigabyte has not only you know added more USB ports and you know added more bullet points to the back of most funny I should say bullet because it's all about bullets this particular theme here but they've actually included technologies that are highly relevant to gamers and to me better sound is one that most gamers don't really seem to understand that they need but they do including a built-in front audio headphone amplifier that's huge that's enormous they've also taken care to use higher-quality capacitors on all of the sound or the sound parts of the board so that you're gonna have good filtering in it so it's not going to have a high noise to sound ratio or rather will have a much higher sound to noise ratio here we've got okay we've got an onboard creative soundblaster x-fi digital audio processor so all of that is included let's see what else they've got to say about themselves SuperSpeed so the onboard Bigfoot killer ii 2100 game networking platform so you guys have probably heard of the killer Nick we actually did an episode about it this basically for all intents and purposes has a dedicated killer Nick built onto it front access control panel for 2 USB 3.0 ports and power to eSATA it includes support for SATA 3 6 gigabit per second and USB 3 super-shield here so this is actually just the heatsink design which looks pretty sweet we're gonna take the board out to show you guys that and it also has D this is another feature that I've wanted to see on more gaming motherboards smart fan connectors so those are going to allow you to actually commander about that to actually configure how the fans connected to all of those headers behave and I don't see it yet but we're gonna find out if those are 4 pin pwm connectors or if they're standard 3 pin connectors ok the board itself no no I'm not gonna let you look at that yet first we're gonna do accessories really quick here all right so we got a poster this is the g1 killer gaming motherboard so there's three different boards in this series the assassin the sniper and the gorilla so they're all featured here on the back of the board is a target or the back of the board on the back of the poster is a target next we have some stickers these are pretty sweet stickers so we've got bullet stickers these are all individual bullets so you can put them wherever you want we've got some bullet holes we've also got a g1 killer sticker okay oh we've got some more look at that some more g1 killer one for each side of your case more bullets more bullet holes next we have a user's manual as well as a driver disk so don't use this download the latest from the gigabyte website box contents okay nice multilingual installation guide book just in case you need it next we have actually let's look at this purse so this is our front panel thing so we've got quick boost which is an overclocking button eSATA slash USB so that's a powered eSATA and two USB 3.0 so that goes in a five and a quarter inch base next we've got a gigabyte sticker although that's not as cool as all those other stickers we saw Dolby home theater sticker and we've got an i/o shield which is conveniently labeled in terms of all the different connectors on the back we have a 3-way SLI bridge and gigabytes classic color scheme so you might want to get yourself a black SLI bridge to go with this board if you are going to install that as well as one crossfire bridge and one SLI bridge and finally we have four SATA cables two are straight and you are right angle cables so I'm going to go ahead and close this because it makes for a great digicam that is digital camouflage not digital camera digicam background for the motherboard itself which I will eventually extract from the packaging and this is a huge board like enormous okay here we go so the first thing let you know what let's go you know I'm gonna do might know I'm gonna do my standard approach to this so the first thing we find is the CPU socket here in the middle of the board that is an LGA 1366 socket as I mentioned before over here on the Left we've got dual eight pin power connector so you can provide a ton that is to say a ton of juice to that CPU socket without running into any power delivery instability let's count the CPU power phases we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 16 oh hold on give me a moment on this one so that is a 16 phase power design around the CPU socket I think we also already talked about these so let's work our way over to the RAM we have support for up to six dims in running in triple-channel so that is up to 24 gigabytes of memory on this particular board you can see here that the first ones we're going to need to populate are the green ones and once you've populated all of the green ones then you can begin to populate the black ones you've got a fair amount of space around the CPU socket in general which is so important for a board like this where the reality of it is nobody's using stock cooling on a motherboard of this caliber so you need lots of space around for aftermarket cooling on the right hand side of the board we've got our 24 pin connector and it's ideal location we also find moving on down the right that we have all of our state of conductivity so these six are going to be running at SATA to three gigabit per second and these two are gonna be running at SATA three is six gigabit per second remember guys the x58 platform and IC ANR do not natively supports a 2/3 so these are running off of a third-party chipset and that is why you don't see more say 2 3 6 gigabit per second connectors on this board down at the bottom we've got our front panel connectors we've got 2 front USB 2 2 front USB 3 headers and then we have a an auxilary molex power connector our front audio in its ideal location this is the first time I've seen front audio here on a gigabyte motherboard usually it's up here over by the audio chipset but you can actually see the creative chipset being used is down here so maybe that's why they put it there in terms of expansion here we go so we've got one two three four PCI Express 16x connectors none of them are two of them are only wired for PCIe 8x so these two are wired for full PCIe 16x and you can see from the spacing that those are the two your intended to use for two-way SLI and then if you were to run 3-way SLI you're probably going to go one two three and four four-way well I think the answer should be quite obvious one two three four additional connectors we have two PCIe 1x one PCI slot so if you are running dual cards in SLI you're going to be left with one PCIe 8 X 1 PCIe 1x and a final PCIe 8 X so here's all of the circuitry that is involved in the built-in amplified amplified motherboard audio ok we also have up here the killer e 20 100 with its dedicated Ram and so I think that's pretty much it for the overall features okay you know what let's have a look at the cooling on this board because it's pretty sweet-looking so the cooling on this board is heat pipes with heat sinks as we've come to pretty much expect at this point from any decently high-end motherboard we've also got some kind of neat design elements here so you can see that this particular heatsink is the front of a pistol okay so if you look at it from that angle you can see that's the sight from the other side you can see that's the barrel so that's kind of neat the one over here at the top doesn't seem to have have that kind of a shape going for it here we've got gaming motherboard we've got some LEDs built in here okay our Northbridge heatsink is very very solid the reality of it is the x58 chipset doesn't require a ton of cooling so gigabytes not concerned about the thermal efficiency of this design I mean it's more than adequate for cooling everything we got here but they just want it to look sweet and they have definitely achieved that now the Southbridge heatsink is just one slab of metal and unlike some of them other boards i've seen with huge cooling heatsink solutions on them in the recent past this one everything is constructed entirely of metal so it's actually going to contribute to cooling now this bottom one is is a clip right there so you can see it's actually got a bullet sticking out the top of it and then on the bottom a convenient little warning just just for the special purchasers out there heatsink not a weapon cannot be assembled as a firearm so please put that out of your mind you won't be doing it that won't be happening what else tell my show oh yeah another thing I wanted to show you guys is yes those controllable fan connectors are all 4 pin pwm so there's one here actually here just back out and I'll show you where they are so we got one here one here one here one here and finally one here I also didn't point out this other auxilary 4 pin power connector now the reason these two are here is because all of the motherboard power comes from the 24 pin connector traditionally these are just for the CPU so that means if you install for graphics card by spec all of them need to pull a pretty decent amount of power out of the board and then they only pull the extra that they need from those connectors at the back so if you plug in 4 high-powered GPUs and you don't use these auxilary power connectors you can actually burn the connectors here from so much current running through them so that's what gigabyte is trying to prevent on their nice shiny high-end motherboard so we've got some more power delivery back here and this is a nice touch I always like to see this proper screws attaching the cooling solution for the motherboard rather than finn's because that's going to make sure that if it gets hot or cold expands contracts no matter what happens everything is going to stay properly attached I'm just looking at the board I mean the overall color scheme of it I think is great they're using their new matte black PCB which I think looks better than anyone elses PCB out there the color scheme is phenomenal with a nice gunmetal appearance to everything and then a couple of green and black accents I think it looks absolutely outstanding it would actually be a great pair for that halfbacks nvidia edition right back there because this is not a standard sized motherboard this is actually a nine expansion slot motherboard so you can see there's two missing spots up here and then seven expansion slots so this is longer than a standard motherboard actually by a fairly substantial margin you know give me a sec I'll go grab one so just for comparison sake here's the p67 AUD for next to the g1 Assassin okay and you can see that it is substantially shorter and it is also substantially narrower so I'm going to go ahead and put it on top and I'll get the cameraman to come have a look at how much wider this board is so you can see the mounting holes here and here there your mounting holes well yeah there's more board to the side of this one then there is on a standard sized ATX motherboard so you gonna make sure you need to have a special case to accommodate a board like this let's go ahead and have a look at the back panel of connectors and I think that's pretty much it we've got two dedicated ps2 connectors I do still like to see these we've got coaxial audio out we have four USB 2.0 four USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet powered by big foot networks and then we have 7.1 audio as well as an additional digital audio output and that is optical thank you for checking out my unboxing of the g1 assassin don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos