GIGABYTE G1.Assassin 2 - The Board

Moving onto the board, you can see we've got the same Black / Green color scheme on offer we've seen from other G1 boards. The black PCB on the board looks great and that's got a lot to do with the fact it's a matte color rather than the shiny one we see from a lot of other companies.

Moving in closer to the board, we can see what's going on in terms of expansion slots. Down the bottom we've got an older legacy PCI slot; along with that we've got two PCIe x1 slots and three PCIe x16 slots. If you're using two video cards you're not going to have a problem installing the bundled WiFi + BT 4.0 card, but if you go down the path of three cards and make use of the middle PCIe x16 slot then you're not going to have room for the PCIe x1 card included in the bundle.

Moving to the bottom of the board, you can see all our connectors. Starting from the left, we've got our front panel audio header, TMP, three USB 2.0 ports and our main front panel header connector.

Turning the corner, we can take a look at the infamous gun heatsink that we saw show up a few weeks ago. The G1 series of boards from a design point of view haven't been the most alluring thing to some people and to be honest, it's us older peeps that probably aren't really feeling the heatsink design some companies use these days. To be honest, though, like the G1.Sniper 2 clip and the Sabertooth color line up, in real life it doesn't look too bad.

In the end, though, if you're not a fan of it there's always an option that doesn't void warranty. You just buy a bunch of video cards to install on the board! Not only does it hide the gun, but it also gives you so much power for when you want to game.

Moving away from the heatsink and onto the bottom corner of the board, you can see we've got a total of eight SATA ports on offer. The six that sit bunched together all run off the Intel chipset with the four black ones being SATA II and the two white ones being SATA III. The other two ports sitting by themselves are also SATA III, but these two ports run off the Marvell 88SE9172 controller. As always, we'd recommend that you opt to use the Intel controlled ones before the others. If you're moving beyond two SATA III devices, though, you'll want to hook them up to the Marvell controlled ports.