Not all motherboards are created equal; just like not all shoes are created equal. And Gigabyte’s new G1.Assassin series can perhaps be compared to the Christian Louboutin high heels of the motherboard industry – substituting the red sole for a rather more gun inspired, killing theme, of course.
The G1.Assassin, G1.Sniper and the G1.Guerrilla are the first gaming motherboards to bring a killer theme directly onto a board in a playful yet deadly serious and elegant way, teaming up top hardware with a fun gun design built onto the hardware.
But is it all for show?
The motherboard itself is designed for super fast and responsive gaming.
The idea is to have a system which allows users to shoot faster, be more responsive, and ergo become a better overall gamer.
Gigabyte reps talk about improved trigger to kill times, something you should really want if you covet any type of gaming cred.
Steve R. Peterson, Director of desktop chipset and strategic marketing at Intel, a Gigabyte partner, said, “these new motherboards, paired with Intel Core i7 Processors Extreme Edition, deliver incredible speed and responsiveness to serious hardcore gamers.”
The main components of the motherboards are an Intel X58 chipset and several onboard solutions from Creative and Bigfoot Networks including Sound Blaster audio technology.
What’s really cool about the audio tech, however, is that Gigabyte’s engineers have cleverly come up with a way to shrink it down and put it on-board, so as to save a whole extra slot which can be used for a graphics card instead.
Although the board looks and sounds cool, however, some hardcore gamers have noted that the EAX gaming network cards provided by Bigfoot are no longer relevant in PC gaming, due to latency problems.
Another misguided decision may have been to include Intel’s X58 chipset and LGA1366 socket, mostly because it’s simply not necessary for hardcore gamers.
Bit-Tech.net suggests, “There should be an LGA1366 Core i7-990X coming out soon, but this looks like a simple speed-bump rather than a radically new CPU. What’s more, according to Intel roadmaps, we’re unlikely to get an ‘affordable’ six-core LGA1366 chip any time soon, which would give us reason to look at X58 boards a bit more seriously again. Even then, games don’t need six-core/12-thread hardware to run at their best – games will typically only address up to four execution units, and favor IPC and frequency over thread-count.”
On the other hand, gamers seem really excited about the Realtek, VIA, and NEC chips included on all three boards in the series.
Overall, it seems that while the board may have hit some targets dead on, it has missed the mark a bit with enthusiasts, who seem unsatisfied with the combination of chips and graphics, and the fact it’s running on an older CPU with newer accoutrement.
