 This video is brought to you by the Intel Core i7 4770K unlocked processor. If you're a speed freak, add an Intel 3500 series SSD to your Haswell system for a truly enthusiast class experience. Welcome to a much demanded unboxing. This is from Gigabyte's G1 Killer series of boards. This is the G1 Sniper 5 gaming motherboard. Now a lot of people ask me, what the heck is a gaming motherboard? I think Gigabyte had it mostly right with the original G1 series board. So that was the Assassin, the Sniper, and the Gorilla, but there were a few things that they got wrong. At the time it was a very strange platform to have a premium gaming board on, LGA 1366, when there was a more updated platform on a different socket, and also they were extremely expensive. Gigabyte has adjusted pricing down somewhat compared to the original Assassin, but kept the premium features coming. So they've actually been improved over those older boards, even though the Sniper 5 is not as expensive as the Assassin was. That isn't to say that this is an inexpensive motherboard, because my friends, it is not. It is extremely expensive. Let's go ahead and run through the accessories. Look at this box of accessories, this is unbelievable. Four-way SLI bridge, three-way SLI bridge, two-way SLI bridge, no crossfire bridge, that's okay, that should come with your motherboard. USB cable for the, I believe this is for the Bluetooth guy. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, sorry, crossfire bridge, there you go, nice black one, matches your board. Next up we've got antenna for wireless. Next up we've got front three and a half inch USB 3.0 bay device, oh, op amp upgrade kit, I'll show you this later. Okay, nice sexy black IO shield, one, two, three, six, SATA 3 connectors, cables, not connectors, a manual, another more different guidebook, a manual for the wireless, and finally a Gigabyte sticker. Yes, one of the most complete accessory kits ever. And what I like about Gigabyte's wireless implementation is it's just PCI express, they don't use some proprietary module. So if you happen to buy yourself a Sniper 5 and you don't want wireless on your gaming motherboard that has super advanced onboard wire networking, you grab this thing, you throw it in another machine like your media center PC and boom, you've got Bluetooth and wireless on that machine instead. I think it's a great value add and more manufacturers should move towards non-proprietary accessories with their boards as opposed to stuff that you can only use. Only with this board and only this board. Okay, anyway, so moving right along we've got black solid caps rated at 10,000 hours at 105 degrees, which is unlikely to happen in your computer, please don't let your computer run at 105 degrees. A gold plated CPU socket, this is one of the few scenarios where gold plating would actually matter because what's good about gold plating is that it's malleable, meaning that it will last for more insertions and removals, which is one of the problems with these LGA sockets. They're not actually rated for very many of them. It has a two times copper PCB, so this is part of their ultra durable five concept, their glass fabric PCB that makes it more resistant to humidity as well as all IR digital power phases. So those are under there and unfortunately you can't really see them, but you'll have to trust me. They're really good and particularly on my gigabyte board, so I use an X79 UP5 on my personal system, no coil whine whatsoever, which is definitely thumbs up. Other physical sort of, I consider this a durable feature, but I don't think that's actually how they brand it, but somewhere around here. There are two physical, there they are, two physical UEFI BIOS chips, meaning that you can switch between them. There's actually an LED indicator so you can see which one you're using. And I want to move right along to the cooling solution. So this is one of the things they were really talking about a lot at Computex. It uses, I would consider this a three option cooling solution. So it can be either completely passive, there you go, see you can see the heat pipe that connects it all the way down to the south bridge area here, or you can run an active fan to cool it. Gigabyte claims it's silent, I call bollocks on that because all these little tiny fans have an irritating whine that drives me absolutely crazy, so I would leave that off. Or you can use the integrated liquid cooling for maximum cooling. We use 3 1⁄8 inch barbs, and while I would have preferred a G1 quarter socket like Asus has implemented on the Maximus 6 formula, the key difference between this and the Maximus 6 formula is this is actually available right from the launch of Haswell. And well, there, this is actually available right now, although that will be coming soon. I would have preferred that, but I use 3 1⁄8 inch tubes anyway, so it wouldn't bother me personally that much, but if you prefer half inch or quarter inch or you want to use nice angled compressions, then you're pretty much out of luck on this one. It also has nine integrated fan connectors, of which seven of them are fully controllable, and one of them is kind of special. So there's the CPU fan connector right up here, as well as the CPU optional one. This is optimized for things like hooking up a secondary pump that you want to run at 100% all the time, or some large heat sinks that actually have dual fans on them. You can plug that in, and that's sort of an auxiliary CPU fan header. Other than that, we've got a couple more here, only three pins, unfortunately. I'd like to see more manufacturers moving towards entirely four-pin PWM fan header designs. You got one, two, three, four along the bottom. Really like to see this, because particularly with a lot of cases that have basements, whether it's car drive cooling fans or radiators or whatever else down there, it's nice to have the option to plug everything into the bottom of the board as well. And then there's one here at the back, which is again nice to see. So they've really put a lot of thought into where those fan headers are, as opposed to just putting them all up here, as if we're all running front 5.25 bay mounted fans. Who does that? Nobody does that. Anyway, moving right along. Gaming-oriented features. So it supports four-way crossfire and four-way SLI, which means that using PLX chips and PCI Express lane splitters and all that stuff, you're achieving at least PCIe 8X 2.0 per slot when you install four cards. However, it should be noted that those splitters don't magically add more bandwidth to the platform and they can actually introduce latency. So I don't necessarily like the implementation, but NVIDIA limits SLI compatible slots to ones that operate at 8X or more for their reported speed. So in order to get four-way SLI working, that's what Gigabyte had to do, and to make it sort of as gaming balls to the walls as they could, they wanted four-way crossfire and four-way SLI support. So we've got three additional PCIe 1X slots. Other gaming features, this right here. Actually, we'll move into audio later. So this right here, dual LAN implementation. So they've got an Intel NIC as well as a Bigfoot Network. So remember, that is a Qualcomm solution now. Bigfoot Networks E2200, meaning that you've got on-the-fly packet prioritization for your gaming traffic as well as a couple of other neat software implementation features that I really like. For example, you could limit the bandwidth available to a particular application. So when I used to upload YouTube videos on my home connection that wasn't as strong, it would just kill the internet connections of everyone else in the house because it was completely saturating it. Then with a Bigfoot NIC, I could actually limit it to only upload at this speed, so everyone else was able to use the internet as well. So that's something that I really like to see. And remember, guys, the SATA ports are color coordinated, so the six black ones are going to be off the Intel chipset and those four gray ones are off of the Marvell chipset. In terms of other connectors on the board that are notable, we've got onboard power and reset connectors as well as onboard V checkpoints and a post indicator LED, a 24-pin power connector I personally consider extremely handy as well as onboard USB 3. You can tell from the red background that that supports their on-off charge feature, which allows you to charge even high-current draw Android or iOS devices even while the computer is off. You've got auxiliary power. I recommend using this if you're running three graphics cards or more. You've also got your front panel connectors, an additional front USB 3 connector, although this one does not support on-off charge, as well as two USB 2 front panel connectors and front audio, which leads us to audio. So this right here, this little strip, actually illuminates green when the board is powered on and represents a physical segregation between the rest of the board and the part of the PCB that handles audio. This is the first time we've seen this feature and it kind of smacks of a bit of a, oh, well, they were doing it, so we were doing it sort of thing, especially with the LED illumination, but it's a good feature and I'm glad to see it implemented on more boards. Gigabyte has taken their sort of their awesome onboard audio concept that they first introduced with the G1 series and they've really upped the ante. So check this out. They're using a Soundcore 3D quad-core processor for the sound processor. How meaningful is it that it's quad-core? Not at all, but what you do get is you get creative software suite and you have hardware accelerating it, so it couldn't be that bad, even if quad-core doesn't necessarily mean anything. You've also got audio grade capacitors here, and check that out. Swappable op-amp on a motherboard. So that's what this little kit here was for. It actually includes a chip puller as well as a second op-amp, so you can try out which one you like more. What op-amps do is they change the signature of the sound. They change the sort of, I don't want to say quality, but they do change the quality, the subjective quality of the sound. So you can not only try out the two that come with your board, but you can swap in pretty much whatever you want and really change the way that the sound operates. They've also got an amplifier that is capable of powering up to 600-ohm headphones. However, if you're running headphones like that, you shouldn't be using onboard audio, even if it's fantastic onboard audio. And all of the audio connectors, look at those, those are sexy, are gold-plated, which may actually matter for these connectors because you want to make sure you have a nice solid connection. It is an analog connector, particularly for digital connections like USB. It totally doesn't matter. But this might actually help, especially if you unplug and plug things in repeatedly. And as far as convenience features go, they have their automated overclocking as well as their Q-Flash utility that makes BIOS flashes a breeze. And I think I've covered the other things that I wanted to say about that. Let's move right along to onboard IO. Here we go. So two USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port. I still like to see these. Coaxial digital audio out as well as optical digital audio out. Six USB 3.0 ports, dual HDMI, display port, and 7.1 audio out. The power connectors, including the 8-pin up here as well as the 24-pin over on the right-hand edge are in their optimal locations. And it should be noted, this is a slightly wider board than normal, so it's an EATX board, but not a fully EATX board. So it only uses the standard ATX mounting holes. Thank you for checking out this unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to Lion's Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And leave a comment. Let me know what you think, guys. Would you spend $400 on a motherboard at this point, or would you buy a cheaper board, maybe a $150 board? GIGABYTE has some great $150 boards. Throw a high-end sound card in it. Throw a high-end NIC card in it, and call that a day. Which do you actually think is a better option?