14 DAY TRIAL // Since late November Gigabyte has been touting us with its G1-Killer motherboards that are supposed to take Asus' R.O.G. Series fully on, and today we get the chance to look at the company's flagship gaming motherboard, the G1.Assassin that is built around Intel's X58 chipset.
Going with X58 means that Gigabyte has more PCIe lanes at its disposal, enabling consumers to build multi-GPU setups, the boards featuring AMD CrossFireX as well as Nvidia SLI support.
As a result the G1.Assassin comes with four PCIe x16 expansion slots, Gigabyte going with a XL-ATX form factor in order to accommodate them all on the motherboard.
This makes the board a lot larger than regular mobos and means that consumers would have to pay special attention to the space available inside their case before going out to buy such a beast of a motherboard.
However, size isn't such a big issue after all.
Instead, what bothers me more, is the fact that Gigabye decided to rely only on the PCIe lanes available in the X58 chipset when building the G1.Assassin as a nForce 200 chip is not available, something that is hard to ignore considering its target audience.
As a result, 4-way SLI setups are not possible on the Assassin and, when more than two graphics cards are plugged in at once, the slots are limited to only PCIe x8 connectivity, a definite minus when compared to the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI for example.
The VRM circuitry as well as the motherboard chipsets are cooled with passive heatsinks that are connected among each other via a heatpipe, all the heatsinks looking like gun parts and even featuring some LEDs.
Although all this bling is usually common for gaming motherboards, I can't help it but feel that Gigabyte has went a little overboard when it designed the Assasin, the magazine shaped southbridge heatsink being especially tacky.
Moving on, as we have previously revealed, the board features a Creative X-Fi PCI Express sound card with a headphone amplifier as well as four additional amplifiers for the rear audio connectors and 128MB of dedicated memory for Creative's X-Fi chip.
Furthermore, the G1.Assassin also features a Killer E2100 network card with 1GB of dedicated DDR2 memory, overkill if you ask me (but it will sure make for a nice sticker on the retail box).
The back panel is fairly clean and features four USB 3.0 ports (thanks to a pair VIA USB 3.0 hub that split up the two ports provided by the Renesas controller), two PS/2 connectors, a Gigabit Ethernet port as well as four USB 2.0 ports and a mix of analogue and digital audio connectors.
As you can see, no eSATA ports are provided, but the board features six SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps connectors.
In addition, throughout the board, Gigabyte has placed five PWM controlled fan headers, but there's aren't any on-board power, reset or clear CMOS buttons.
Finally, pricing remains unknown, but the “entry-level” G1.Guerrilla will be available for $299.99, so this should prove to be far more expensive.
For Gigabyte's sake, I hope it won't end up costing more than the $399.99 EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI as it hasn't managed to impress me with its feature set. (via SemiAccurate)
