 Welcome to a very exciting and very exclusive unboxing. This is the Gigabyte G1 snipers. Actually I think that's a two. The G1 sniper 2. I actually have not only the sniper 2 but also the sniper 1 so we can compare them against each other. But let's go over what is similar about them before we even get started here. So number one they're both made by Gigabyte. Number two they both have a three year warranty in the US and Canada. Number four? I lost track. Okay. They're also both part of the G1 gaming series of motherboards from Gigabyte which means these are decked out to the nines with all the gear you need for gaming. We also have X-Fi Extreme Fidelity Sound on both of these boards. Killer E2100 gaming networking built into both of these boards and support for fast Intel processors built into both of these boards however they are different. The G1 sniper used the Intel X58 platform in 1366 CPUs. The G1 sniper 2 uses the Z68 platform and Intel second generation core i7, core i5, and core i3 CPUs. So that means it does support Sandy Bridge processors and they have also built in support for upcoming Intel 22 nanometers processors which are codenamed Ivy Bridge. So you are going to be buying a fairly future proof motherboard with the sniper too. Last but not least it is ready for native PCI Express Gen 3 that is double the bandwidth or quadruple the bandwidth of PCI Express 2.0 and 1.0 respectively. Very cool. So that means even if you're running two way SLI with dual 8x PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards that will be the same bandwidth that used to be available to motherboards that were running dual SLI in dual 16x PCIe 2.0 slots. So there's something to consider. Because it does support Sandy Bridge we do have full support for Intel SRT technology. So that's where you take your SSD, you use it as a cache for your hard drive and you can run up to 4 times faster in a real world scenario. Honestly it baffles me that more people aren't using SRT because it really does work. It's very very cool. Let's go ahead and start taking this box apart here and we'll do our typical unboxing and then I'm going to do a bit of a comparison between the Sniper 2 and the Sniper 1. I'll take that one out as well and we'll have a quick look at it. So here's the Sniper 2. Comes in a nice matte black box to match that gorgeous matte black PCV. And let's look at what we've got in terms of accessories. We have the Gigabyte G1 Series poster which I have seen a couple of times included with G1 Series boards with the original Assassin, Sniper and Guerrilla characters on the front as well as a target with pre-bullet holed holes on it for you on the back. Next we have some stickers including more bullet holes, a skull, some bullets, more bullets and bullet holes. Excellent stuff. Finally we have a Gigabyte sticker. Not finally, there's still more. Actually this is a very rich accessory package. User's manual including some notes. PCI Express 16x slots are compatible with next generation Intel 22nm CPUs and support the PCI Express 3.0 standard. Very cool. Driver disk, throw that away, download the latest from the Gigabyte website. Smart response technology installation guide. Gigabyte actually has a much better, much smarter way to install this. Just download the little utility off their website. It's awesome. It's so easy. I couldn't even believe it. Alright, next we've got four SATA cables. Remember those are going to be compatible with SATA 2 or SATA 3, doesn't really matter. And a DVI to HDMI adapter. Remember those are signal compatible so it doesn't really matter if you use an adapter. There is no signal degradation. We have an I.O. shield, a black flexible SLI bridge. Nice touch. I hate seeing those ugly brown SLI bridges included on high end boards because it just makes your build look terrible. Oh this is nice. Look at this. Okay so Gigabyte includes Quick Boost, so I'm guessing that's a one touch overclocking button. eSATA USB combo port and then two USB 3.0 ports in a 5.25 inch bay adapter piece. Very nice because a lot of cases still don't support USB 3.0 so you can add that to your existing case while you wait to upgrade it or whatever the case may be. Very nice. And here it is, the Snyker 2. Their G1 series boards just look so good. Like they just look so good. Gigabyte used to be kind of in my eyes a bit of a joke in terms of their aesthetic but they have just turned that completely around with the G1 series boards. They've got a very sharp overall look so we're using a matte black PCB. We have certain shiny components including the VRM's, including the CPU socket. We've got a little bullet sticking out of... I believe you guys were telling me this is a mag not a clip. Can't remember for the life of me anymore. We've also got the barrel of a pistol as part of the MOSFET cooling up here and green lights here that look just great if you throw in something like a GTX 590 which also has glowing lights on the side. Looks just amazing in a gaming build. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, getting to that later. So why don't we look at the overall layout of the board first. So first of all we start with the CPU socket in the middle. That is an LGA1155 socket supporting Intel Sandy Bridge and even Ivy Bridge CPUs so be ready for that. We've got our power delivery up here on the top left exactly where it belongs. That's an 8 pin slot. Next we have our CPU fan connector here which is a 4 pin PWM CPU fan connector. You can clearly see the VRM cooling is using a sort of a gun metal themed, gun appearance themed look. It's got heat pipes that are carrying from the chipset up to this side and then it just has a dedicated non-heat piped MOSFET heat sink up at the top. Moving over to the right hand side we have 4 DDR3 slots supporting dual channel operation. Next we have our 24 pin power connector along the right hand edge and this is something that I just don't see enough of. USB 3 header on the right hand edge of the board. This is the smartest place for it. I am just tired of running front panel connectors way down here to the bottom when you don't have to. They should be right here because that's where they're going to be the closest to the front of your case. Love it. Great design decision. Next we've got 2 SATA3 connectors running off of a third party chipset. We have 2 SATA3 connectors running off of the Intel chipset and then we have 3 SATA2 connectors also running off the Intel chipset. Your last Intel SATA2 connector is likely running off the back as an eSATA connector. Alright next we've got some more, you know what I'll do a summary of the fan headers at the end so that you guys can see where they all are. Here is the custom header for the OC button that was on that front panel. Next we've got our front panel headers, we've got a clear CMOS jumper, we've got a front USB so you see the one with the red background, that means that it supports higher current so you can actually charge things like tablets with the utility from the Gigabyte website off of those particular ports so make sure you plug those ones in first. You've got a couple more front USB 2s, front panel audio and in terms of PCIe slot layout we've got 2 PCIe 16x slots, 2 PCIe 1x slots and 2 PCI slots so that's a pretty good mix. If you install 2 dual slot cards you're going to be covering these guys, those 2 and those 2 so that will leave you with 1 PCIe 1x and 1 PCI slot. Now having fewer expansion slots on a board like this is far less of a concern because you already have a very high end hardware sound card, check that out, and a very high end hardware NIC, those are already built into the board so you pretty much don't need to replace them with anything, very very cool. Alright actually yeah I promised I'd do you guys a summary of all of the CPU connectors, so our fan connectors rather, we've got 1, 2, stay further back so I can just point out where they are, 3, 4, 5, 5, yep, 5 fan connectors, it's a very respectable amount and they are all PWM so you don't have to fuss with any sort of linear voltage adjustments for changing the RPM of your fans. On the back here we will find 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 USB 2.0 ports, that guy is a combo USB 2 eSATA port, love these ports, so handy, everything should be this flexible. And then 2 USB 3.0 ports, personally I believe that's enough especially if you already have 2 in the front, since most things that I'm using USB 3.4 these days are just storage anyway which I'm plugging and unplugging fairly frequently. We've got our OC button on the back, alright that should be pretty self explanatory, OC's, next we have a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, an HDMI output, more on that in just a second, and then we have gigabit ethernet and finally 7.1 audio with optical audio out. So this is a feature that I didn't mention before, this is Intel Quick Sync, so what you can do is you can use that HDMI port, you can use your HDMI to DVI adapter, put it in like that, and you can actually take advantage of the onboard graphics card built into the Intel CPU to transcode video even when you're running a dedicated graphics card. There is a slight performance decrease but I would say for the incredible boost you get in transcoding performance, especially if you have a tablet or a smartphone, you want to switch your videos over to a compatible format, it is an enormous advantage to the Intel Z68 platform. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Gigabyte G1 Sniper 2, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.