Layout

At a first glance we noticed two things with the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2: the southbridge cooler as well as the power design cooler don't have any weapon like design anymore. Finally we would say. The second thing concerns the colour scheme of their Killer series. It come on a black  PCB with the grenn expansion slots. The layout itself has been well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. Also there is one slot space between each green PCIe 16x to make 4-Way SLI/CrossFireX possible. Furthermore you'll find a PLX PEX 8747 bridge switch chip that basically takes sixteen lanes from the CPU and is able to split them into x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8. Meanwhile the last PCI 16x slot is close to the connectors at the bottom of the motherboard which will make them inaccessible, if you choose to put a dual slot GPU in there. We also noticed that there is three centimeters of space between the CPU socket and the first memory, which is a bit more than other boards.

Gigabyte equipped the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 with a 15 (6x2 + 2 + 1) phase power design for the processor. In fact there are six times two phases for vcore, two phases for IGP (Integrated Graphic Processor) and finally one phase for IMC (Integrated Memory Controller)/VTT. As for the other components, the memory benefits power from two phases, the PCH - also known as southbridge - is powered by one single phase. Futhermore there is the additional PLX chip which gets another phase and the last phase in charge of the power deliviery to the I/O components.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3. Officially supported are the following clock speeds: 2666 (OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz. There is also enough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't encounter compatibility issues with tower coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Meanwhile with a double tower cooler you may find some incompatibility issues with high end memory that ships with huge heatspreaders.

This time Gigabyte didn't equip their gamer board with coolers shaped like weapons. On this board you will find the same coolers like on the Gigabyte Z77 motherboards, but of course in a different colour. As you can see in the pictures bellow, the heatpipe cooling loop has got one more cooler than the other boards. There is the PLX chip with its eight watts dissipation power that has been integrated too.