G1 Assassin Overview
The first thing you will notice when you take the board out is the colors. We have been so used to the blue and white design on Gigabyte motherboards it is nice to see a change here. Gigabyte has gone with an all black PCB, with black and green accents. I know Gigabyte was going for a military look, but these colors make it look a little like an Nvidia product. The colors do pop though and this motherboard will look great inside of your case.
Starting up at the CPU socket it is pretty clear. You can see the 16 phase power design made with Japanese solid capacitors and Ferrite core chokes. The power phase cooling looks like the barrel of a gun. Power comes to the CPU via dual 8-pin power connectors. It is not often we see dual connectors here, usually only on the highest-end boards.
Moving down you can see the main heatsink in the center of the board. It is made to look like a part of gun. It has a Gigabyte logo on it and features five green LED lights, which you will see a little later in the review.
To the right of the CPU socket, there are three channel DIMM slots. The slots keep with the theme as three of them are black and three of them are green. You can fit a total of 24GB of memory in the slots and the memory speed is supported up to 2200MHz. Going to the end of the board you have the 24-pin ATX power connection and a 4-pin fan connection. Moving down the board, there are six SATA II 3GB/s ports (black) and two SATA III 6GB/s ports (white). In the pictures below you can see the southbridge heatsink, which is made to look like an ammo clip, it even has a bullet on the end!
Moving along to the bottom of the board there are most of the internal connectors. Left to right, there are two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, the front panel connectors, and another 4pin fan connector. The red USB 2.0 connector is the one that features Gigabyte’s On/Off Charge technology, which allows you to charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch regardless of whether your PC is on, in standby mode or even off. A derivative of GIGABYTE’s highly acclaimed 3x USB Power feature, On/Off Charge enables devices to draw more current from GIGABYTE motherboard USB ports than standard USB ports allow, so that charging from your PC can be as fast as with a charger.
As for expansion slots, there are four PCI-E x16 slots, because of the ATX-XL form factor they are nicely spaced out. There is a 4-pin Molex connector above to top slot if you need extra power. There are also two PCI-E x1 slots and a single PCI slot.
On the far left side of the board, one will find the onboard sound and Killer NIC processors. The G1 Assassin and Sniper are the world’s only gaming motherboards to feature the Creative 20K2 processor along with X-Fi and EAX. If you do some research you will see that this sound processor is really a best. Moving up the board a little, you can see the Bigfoot Networks E2100 processor. For more information on the E2100, check out our review of the standalone card. The G1 boards are also the world’s first to have on-board Bigfoot Networks processors.
Finally, looking at the connection on the I/O panel going from left to right there are PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, optical out, two USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet port, four more USB 2.0 ports and your audio connections. I was a little disappointed to not see a Clear CMOS button.
