14 DAY TRIAL // Back in November, Gigabyte announced that was preparing a new gaming-orientated motherboard line, dubbed G1-Killer, and today the very first hard facts about these new mobos came out into the open as a Serbian website has uncovered the names of the upcoming models as well as some technical details about them.
For starters, the Taiwanese company will release three models, all of them based on the Intel X58 chipset.
Dubbed the X58-G1, X58-G2 and X58-G3 (or Assassin, Killer and Guerrilla) these motherboards will accept LGA 1366 processors built using the Bloomfiled or Gulftown core.
Although this fact was already known thanks to a picture posted online by Gigabyte's marketing team, the Tehnoguru website has uncovered more details regarding the specifications of each motherboard thanks to “several nerds who work at Gigabyte's Taiwan headquarters.”
Moving from top to bottom, the first motherboard in the Killer series will be called the X58-G1 and features an XL-ATX form factor as well as 2 x16 or 4 x8 PCIe slots that can take 3-way SLI and 4-way CrossFireX configurations.
Although not yet ratified, the XL-ATX standard was used in several motherboards launched until now, including Gigabyte's GA-890FXA-UD7 and GA-X58A-UD9 as well as the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI mobo, as it allows for more PCIe expansion slots to be installed.
In addition, the X58-G1 cools the chipset as well as its 16-phase VRMs using a heatpipe setup, features Creative HW 20K2 audio and a Bigfoot network LAN chip.
Compared to its older brother, the X58-G2 drops one of the PCIe slots as well as the XL-ATX form factor.
However, users still get the Creative HW 20K2 sound chip and the Bigfoot network card, together with 3-way SLI and CrossFireX support.
And finally, we make our way to the X58-G3, the least advanced motherboard of the trio that features 2 x16 and one x8 PCI Express slots, 8-phase power delivery circuit, 3-way SLI and CrossFireX support, an ALC889 sound codec as well as a Bigfoot-built network card.
Gigabyte's G1-Killer motherboard series is slated to make its debut at CES 2011.