Review: Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3
Published by Christian Ney on 29.05.12Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The G1.Sniper 3 is Gigabytes interpretation of a high end Intel Z77 based gaming motherboard. The first thing you'll notice are the coolers which aren't looking like guns/weapons anymore. We're really happy to see a more mature design with a black and green color scheme. As a byline: it reminds us a bit of the old DFI motherboard days. On the I/O panel you will only find USB3 ports making USB2 already EOL. Really convincing, that's what the delivery was. Indeed, there is so much stuff provided in the bundle of this motherboard that you don't need to buy anything else. | - Layout - Bundle - Design - No more gun/weapon coolers - Only USB3 |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Generally the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3's layout has been very well thought. You will find everything that is practical and useful like for example reset/power/clear_cmos buttons as well as a BIOS switch, voltage reading points, a Debug LED Post Code display and once more practical are the angled SATA connectors and finally one legacy PCI slot which can still be very useful nowadays. We really like the fact that Gigabyte put a PLX chip on this board. Like this you can even create a four way SLI/CrossFireX setup. On the other hand we really didn't like the fact that they used cheaper and worse audio and LAN controllers than on all previous Killer and Sniper motherboards. |
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4-Way SLI/CrossFireX - Onboard buttons - Debug LED Post Code - Voltage reading points - Legacy PCI |
- Worse audio and LAN chips than the other Killer boards | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| From this point of view, Gigabytes G1.Sniper 3 can be found in
the center span of our comparison tables but there are also some
exceptions. Regarding our 3D performance rating the board ranks in the
center span and the same you'll find for the 2D performance rating. A
closer look at the individual performance numbers shows that in all
Futuremark benchmarks this board is just a tick slower than the
competition. Fortunately concerning games the results were much better.
Looking at this boards power consumption we see that there was no other board that needed more juice to operate. It didn't matter if we looked at idle or load power consumption. In both cases this board needed more power than the competititors models. |
- Games | - 3D Mark 11 - 3D Mark Vantage - 3D Mark 01 - Resident Evil 5 - Power Consumption |
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| BIOS / Overclocking | + | - | |
| Gigabyte 3D-BIOS is very well structured and settings can be found quickly and easily. Furthermore overclocking the board is really easy and you'll quickly succeed in reaching higher clock frequencies. Even extreme overclockers will find all suitable settings to push their hardware to the very limit. | -
Well structured BIOS
- UEFI-BIOS - Voltage measuring points |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you should be looking for a good gaming motherboard, that comes with many features, then the G1.Sniper 3 from Gigabyte will be a good choice. | -
Overclocking - Gaming |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 good four out of five stars. | |||
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