Gadgetory

welcome to a very exciting and very exclusive unboxing this is the gigabyte g1 snipers actually I think that's a to the g1 sniper to I actually have not only the sniper do but also the sniper one so we can compare them against each other but let's go over what is similar about them before we even get started here so number one they're both made by gigabyte number two they both have a three year warranty in the u.s. in Canada number three four five I lost track okay they're also both part of the g1 gaming series of motherboards from gigabyte which means these are decked out to the nines with all the gear you need for gaming we also have x5 extreme fidelity sound on both of these boards killer a 2100 gaming networking built into both of these boards and support for fast Intel processors built into both of these boards however they are different the g1 sniper used the Intel x58 platform in 1366 CPUs the g1 sniper 2 uses the z68 platform and Intel second generation Core i7 Core i5 and core i3 CPUs so that means it does support Sandy Bridge processors and they have also built in support for upcoming until 22 nanometers processors which are codenamed Ivy Bridge so you are going to be buying a fairly future-proof motherboard with the sniper - last but not least it is ready for native PCI Express gen3 that is double the bandwidth or quadruple the bandwidth of PCI Express 2.0 and 1.0 respectively very cool so that means even if you're running to a sli with dual 8 X PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards that will be the same bandwidth that used to be available to motherboards that we're running dual SLI in dual 16x pcie 2.0 slots so there's something to consider because it does support Sandy Bridge we do have full support for Intel SRT technology so that's where you take your SSD you use it as a cache for your hard drive and you can run up to four times faster in a real-world scenario honestly it baffles me that more people aren't using SRT because it really does work it's very very cool let's go ahead and start taking this box apart here and we'll do our typical unboxing and then I'm gonna do a bit of a comparison between the sniper two and the sniper one I'll take that one out as well we'll have a quick look at it so here's the sniper two comes in a nice matte black box to match that gorgeous matte black PCV and let's look at what we've got in terms of accessories we have the gigabyte g1 series poster which I have seen a couple of times included with g1 series boards with the original assassin sniper and guerrilla characters on the front as well as a target with pre bullet hold pulse on it for you on the back next we have some stickers including more bullet holes a skull of some bullets more bullets and vocals an excellent stuff finally we have a gigabyte sticker not finally there's still more actually this is a very rich accessory package user's manual including some notes PCI Express 16x slots are compatible with next generation until 22 nanometer CPUs and support the PCI Express 3.0 standard very cool driver disk throw that away download the latest from the gigabyte website Smart Response technology installation guide gigabyte actually has a much better much smarter way to install this just download the little utility off their website it's awesome it's so easy I couldn't even believe it alright next we've got four SATA cables remember those are going to be compatible with SATA 2 or SATA 3 doesn't really matter and a DVI to HDMI adapter remember those are signal compatible so it doesn't really matter if you use an adapter there is no signal degradation we have an i/o shield a black flexible SLI bridge nice touch I hate seeing those ugly Brown SLI bridges including on included on high-end boards because it just makes your build look terrible oh this is nice look at this okay so gigabyte includes quick boost so I'm guessing that's a one tattoo overclocking button esata/usb combo port and then two USB 3.0 ports and a five and a quarter inch bay adapter piece very nice because a lot of case still don't support usb3 so you can add that to your existing case while you wait to upgrade it or whatever the case may be very nice and here it is this night go to their g1 series boards just looks so good like they just look so good gigabyte used to be kind of in my eyes a bit of a joke in terms of their aesthetic but they've just turned that completely around with this with the g1 series boards they've got a very sharp overall look so we're using a matte black PCB we have certain shiny components including the VRMs including the CPU socket we've got a little bullet sticking out of I believe you guys were telling you this is a mag not a clip can't remember for the life of me anymore we've also got the barrel of a pistol as part of the mosfet cooling up here and green lights here that looked just great if you throw in something like a GTX 590 which also has glowing lights on the side looks just amazing in a gaming bill that's interesting okay getting get into that later so why don't we look at the overall layout of the board first so first of all we start with the CPU socket in the middle that is an LGA 1155 socket supporting Intel Sandy Bridge and even Ivy Bridge CPU so be ready for that we've got our power delivery up here on the top left exactly where it belongs that's an 8 pin a pin savate slot next we have our CPU fan character here which is a 4 pin PWM CPU fan connector you can clearly see the vrm cooling is using a sort of gun mettle themed gun appearance themed look it's got heat pipes that are carrying from the ball from the chipset up to this side and then it just has a dedicated non heat piped off that heats tank up at the top moving over to the right hand side we have for ddr3 slots supporting dual channel operation next we have our 24 pin power connector along the right-hand edge and this is something that I just don't see enough of USB 3 header on the right hand edge of the board this is the smartest place for it I'm just tired of running front panel connectors way down here to the bottom when you don't have to they should be right here because that's where they're going to be the closest to the front of your case love it great designs the decision next we've got to say that's three connectors running off of a third-party chipset we have to say - three connectors running off of the Intel chipset and then we have three SATA 2 connectors also running off the Intel chipset your last Intel SATA 2 connector is likely running off the back as an eSATA connector alright next we've got some more if you know what I'll do a summary of the fan headers at the end so that you guys can see where they all are here is the custom header for the OC button that was on that front panel next we've got our front panel headers we've got a clear CMOS jumper we've got front USB so you see the one with the red background that means that it supports a higher current so you can actually charge things like tablets with the utility from the gigabyte website off of those particular ports so make sure you plug those ones in first you've got a couple more front USB 2's front panel audio and in terms of PCIe slot layout we've got two PCIe 16x slots two PCIe 1x slots and two PCI slots so that's pretty good mix if you installed two dual slot cards you're gonna be covering these guys those two and those two so that'll leave you with one PCIe 1x and one PCI slot now having fewer expansion slots on a board like this is far less of a concern because you already have a very high end hardware sound card check that out and a very high end hardware NIC both are already built into the board so you pretty much don't need to replace them with anything very very cool alright actually ok yeah I promised I'd do you guys the summary of all of these CPU connectors so our fan connectors rather we've got one to stay further back so I can just point out where they are three four five five yep fan five and connectors it's a very respectable amount and they are all PWM so you don't have to fuss with any sort of linear voltage adjustments for changing the RPM of your fans on the back here we will find one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports that guy's a combo USB 2 eSATA port love these ports so handy everything should be this flexible and then two USB 3.0 ports personally I believe that's enough especially if you already have two in the front since most things that I'm using USB 3 for these days are just storage anyway which I'm plugging and unplugging fairly frequently we've got our own C button on the back alright that should be pretty self-explanatory OCS next we have a ps2 USB ps2 keyboard mouse combo port and HDMI output more on that in just a second and then we have Gigabit Ethernet and finally 7.1 audio with optical audio out so this is a feature that I didn't mention before this is Intel Quick Sync so what you can do is you can use that HDMI port you can use your HDMI to DVI adapter put it in like that and you can actually take advantage of the onboard graphics card built into the Intel CPU to transcode video even when you're running a dedicated graphics card there is a slight performance decrease but I would say for the incredible boost you get in transcoding performance especially if you have a tablet or a smartphone you want to switch your videos over to a compatible format it is an enormous advantage to the Intel z68 platform so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the gigabyte g1 sniper - don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos