Layout

At a first glance the Gigabyte G1.Sniper Z87 leaves a good impression with its harmonic design. The manfucaturer decided to go for a combination of matte black and green, where there are two green PCIe as well as two memory. Also the headsinks have received green stripes. The layout is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install large coolers without any issues. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allow for easy installation of oversized graphics cards.



The Gigabyte G1.Sniper Z87 comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory can rely on two phases for stable current delivery. As we already mentioned on the features page, this board comes with a digital power design, which is standard already with mid-range motherboards these days. Nevertheless it's actually quite astonishing to see, that this board is quite similar to the Z87X-UD3H, which costs about 12 Euro more.


Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the G1.Sniper Z87. Officially supported are DDR3 3000(O.C.) / 2933(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2600(O.C.) / 2500(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2200(O.C.) / 2133(O.C.) / 2000(O.C.) / 1866(O.C.) / 1800(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't run into issues with large coolers even if you choose to install memory with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.


Southbrigde, northbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via passive heatsinks, whereas the two heatsinks, which cover the VRM area are not connected. On another note it is nice feeling, that this board is actually heavier than average, which is always a good indicator on how serious a manufacturer is about a certain product. Other than that we were surprised to see that the thermal pads on the heatsinks cover far more than just the VRM ICs.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1