Layout

Gigabyte provided the G1.Assassin with an independant color scheme. Already at a first glance one can see that this board belongs to an own product category. The PCB itself has been covered with a matte black color and the expansion slots, three DIMM slots as well as parts of the heatpipe are green. Altogether this really is one good looking board. The shape of the cooling blocks might be a matter of taste and it once more underlines the target group Gigabyte has.

For sure Gigabytes high-end gaming motherboard comes with some nice features. One thing they focussed on was good sound quality. Therefore the engineers at Gigabyte decided to to put a Creative CA20K2 chip onto the board which offers clean and crisp audio as well as realtime encoding capabilities. Furthermore there also is a Bigfoot Killer NIC on this board. One can argue about this chip but at least if you own a cheap router and you do a lot of downloading it will optimize your network performance because it can prioritize smaller netzwork packets.

Totally you'll find six DIMM-slots on the Gigabyte G1.Assassin. Officially supported are DDR3 - 2200(OC) / 2133 (OC) / 1866 / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 with up to 24 GByte capacity. Positioning of the DIMM-slots has been well thought which means they aren't too close to the CPU socket. Therefore there wont be incompatibilities between huge CPU coolers and big memory modules.

Northbridge as well as the current converters are being kept at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge has also been connected to the heatpipe allowing efficient cooling. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big makes it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.