Before we start dishing out our Z87 reviews, let’s spend a few moments checking out the products first. As with every launch of Intel’s processors comes the impetus for board makers to create new designs for their products. In this gallery, we’ll check out GIGABYTE’s flagship gaming motherboard: the G1.Sniper 5, part of the G1 Killer line of gaming motherboards which GIGABYTE has been quite modest in releasing variants of as of its debut back in the Sandy Bridge era. The G1 line brandishes superior audio and LAN on top of incredible performance and quality as its primary selling point with the product presented in a jungle green, guerilla-ish motiff. Moving on.
GIGABYTE’s recent flagship models featured an low-key shot boxart and in the 8-series line-up, all the packaging now have this styling. Contrary to the previous releases of the G1.Killer line, the box art does away with the jungle digi-camo pattern and brandishes the same packaging style as the entire 8-series line-up. This makes the entire GIGABYTE line for the 8-series much more uniform and easy to recognize. Going back to the packaging itself, the front features a shot of the heatsink with a large print of the model name in the lower part with minimal marketing logos. The back of the box highlights key features of the motherboard.
The package includes a hefty bundle with all the necessary bling worthy of a high-end motherboard. We have 6 SATA cables, a front panel USB3.0 header, a GIGABYTE WIFI/Bluetooth PCI-e card with a unified antenna (the previous versions had two), PCB SLI bridges, CrossFire cables, a backplate, and last but not the least: a GIGABYTE sticker. Also included in every purchase is a replacement OP-AMP and chip puller. GIGABYTE will be releasing a retail variant of this kit with 3 replacement OP-AMPs included. For those not following what an OP-AMP is, more on that later.
Here is the board’s front and back from a top-down view. We’ve noticed that GIGABYTE has slowly drifted away from the guns and ammo clip stylings on their heatsinks (probably a response from what MSI did with the Xpower II X79 and realized how cheap they looked). The entire board still exudes a military appeal with the green and black coloring, this time around with a brighter green compared to past iterations. Checking out the back, we get a clearer shot of the PCB and its flat black glory. GIGABYTE really has a great way of showing off that matte black PCB in a way no other board manufacturer does. More details in the close-ups next.
The rear I/O ports include a whopping six USB3.0 ports, a legacy PS/2 peripherals port along with a pair of USB2.0 ports. Multimedia ports include gold-plated dual-HDMI ports, SPDIF output, DisplayPort, and for audio an optical output as well as five gold-plated audio jacks. Yup… gold-plated. It’s just for bling really. And wear-resistance. Rounding off this side are a pair of LAN ports, one of which is the Killer E2200 powered by Qualcomm Atheros and the other one powered-off the internal Intel LAN.
Nobody uses PCI anymore! Well, for pure gaming rigs maybe. GIGABYTE seems to agree though as they  have done away with legacy PCI slots and using four full-length X16 PCI-E slots (2 of which are full X16, the others are X8). All of which are PCI-E 3.0. These are alternated with 3 PCI-E x4 slots.
The new heatsink design cools down the 16-phase VRM. Plenty of juice for the newer Haswell procs. As usual, GIGABYTE brags their International Rectifier (IR) PWMs here. All of which are cooled by a nice quality heatsink which features a much-missed feature from GIGABYTE’s board: the integrated watercooling barbs. This little feature gets traded off each and every generation between ASUS and GIGABYTE and for this generation, looks like GIGABYTE has the lease on it with the ROG-equivalent using threads for expansion rather than integrating the barbs themselves.
Moving over to the right edge of the board, we see a total of 10 SATAIII ports. The black ones are all powered off the Intel chipset with an additional 4 ports powered-off a Marvell 88SE9230 controller, all of which are SATAIII.
The front panel header is placed in the lower right along with a front USB3.0 header, another one is placed near the 24-pin PSU connector. A couple of fan headers as well as USB2.0 headers also line the lower part of the board.
One of the main moneymaker for the G1.Sniper 5 is the inclusion of a Creative SoundCore 3D chip in the hardware-level. This ain’t no software-based solution, this is the real deal. A premium audio chip provides stereo, quadrophonic and 5.1 surround for the G1.Sniper 5 and gives the user options to swap-out OP-AMPs for the discerning audio buff.
Here is shot of the OP-AMP being removed with the included chip puller.
And when the light is off and the board is one, that’s where all the magic happens. Yeah, Â yeah you can argue ASUS was first at doing this but as long it looks good and its not patented I say its a nice feature to have on certain boards.
Definitely a board to look-out for for Z87 adopters. Stay tuned for our review of the GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 soon.