Introduction

I found myself taking over the motherboard category here at TweakTown just as the new Z68 chipset launched from Intel. Having missed the boat on the G1 series of boards from GIGABYTE for the X58 platform and having no P67 version to look at, I was really disappointed as the series looked to be one of the most feature packed ones on the market.

Jump forward a few months and we saw GIGABYTE bring the G1 series back in the form of the GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 2; it offered everything you'd want from a board that was focused on the gaming market. I liked the board so much that it made its way into my own system paired with a 2600k and HD 6990. The Killer E2100 NIC while I feel is probably just as good as an Intel one is a really nice addition, but the onboard X-Fi audio is a real stand out for me, along with the Matte Black PCB.

Jump forward a few more months, though, with the launch of the X79 chipset and we saw that GIGABYTE was getting on the G1 bandwagon straight away. Last week we managed to preview the new GIGABYTE G1.Assassin 2, but today we get to really see what the new board is about in our full review. Because we've already previewed the board, we've had the opportunity to cover almost every aspect of the board already. Really, the only thing we've missed is the PCIe specifications when it comes to the expansion slots.

So with so much of the board already looked at, we'll just quickly offer you a look at our original pictures and cover a few things we couldn't tell you. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the new 3D BIOS from GIGABYTE and let you know what we think of GIGABYTEs first foray into the graphical UEFI BIOS.

Of course, after that we'll get into the performance side of things along with overclocking to see what the new board is able to do for us. So with all that said, let's get into a bucket load of pictures before we get into the meat of the review to see what the board is all about.

The Package

Like we said in our preview, the GIGABYTE board carries with it an really impressive bundle with one of the biggest highlights being the new PCIe x1 card which offers us both 802.11n wireless connectivity and Bluetooth 4.0 as seen on the new iPhone 4S.