G1.Assassin 2 - Gaming

Already at the launch of Intels upcoming X79 chipset Gigabyte will have a pure gaming motherboard in its portfolio. The G1.Assassin 2 also comes with a black PCB but with venom green expansion slots. The most flamboyant design aspect on the G1.Assassin 2 concerns the southbridge cooler which actually is shaped like a weapon. Lots of gamer will like this but we think there definitely wont be other users buy this board.
Counting the phases of the power design, we get 18. Again, this is an unusual number for a power design. Therefore we're waiting for Gigabyte to disclose the specs of the board. It might be possible that there are additional phases on the backside of the motherboard.
Gigabytes gaming motherboard comes with three full size PCI-Express slots. Between the first two you find PCI-Express x1 slots and the last expansion slot is a legacy PCI. The first and the third full size PCI-Express slot features sixteen lanes where as the second is connected to the CPU with eight lanes.


Gigabyte decided to equip the G1.Assassin 2 with four DIMM slots which means that using 8 Gigabyte modules one can put 32 Gigabyte of memory on this board. Like we know it from the UD5 and UD7 the developers put two passive cooling blocks on chipset and current converters. The two blocks are connected via a heatpipe to provide good cooling efficiency.
A closer look at the I/O panel lets us guess, that this board features four USB3.0 ports, four USB2.0 connecotrs, two eSATA ports, an analogue audio panel, a gigabit ethernet port as well as an optical audio out and a PS2 mouse/keyboard connector. Furhtermoer there also is a CLR-CMOS button.


Regarding SATA ports you wont find ten like on the other Gigabyte X79 board, there are "only" eight. Because all ports have been angled by 90 degrees there wont be any compatibility issues with oversized graphics cards.
Looking for fan header you'll find five on the G1.Assassin 2. There located around the CPU socket, on the left side of the board and at the bottom edge.
With the gaming motherboards Gigabyte also delivers a sound chip that has been manufactured by Creative. Normally is an X-Fi chip which offers nice and crisp audio quality. Fruthermore they also put a Killer NIC on these kind of boards which they bundle with decent sofware to control all your NAT settings and traffic related things.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - GA-X79-UD7 - Enthusiast and Overclocking
Page 2 - GA-X79-UD3 - Mainstream and Overclocking	Page 5 - G1.Assassin - Gaming
Page 3 - GA-X79-UD5 - Content Creation	Page 6 - Conclusion

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