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CES 2011: Gigabyte

by: John -
More On: CES 2011
Gigabyte was located at the Venetian and while I couldn’t make it to their press conference, I was able to hit their suite to check out their new line of motherboards. Now, they’re really focusing on the gaming sector and have three new motherboards to show for it.

The G1-Killer Gaming Series of motherboards offer up some serious features for gamers in various price points They are an X58 line of motherboards, so not compatible with the new Sandy Bridge Intel chips, but I’m sure they’ll be releasing a G1-Killer Gaming Series of Sandy Bridge compatible motherboards later on down the road.

For the serious gamer, there’s the G1.Assassin. This bad boy’s got four SLI slots giving you the ability to do four way Crossfire with AMD cards or three way SLI with NVIDIA cards in an XL-ATX form factor. There are six ram slots available so you can deck this puppy out with memory galore. Four large heatsinks help cool the motherboard and they are all interconnected with a heat pipe. One of the heat pipes even features some LED lights.

Onboard, a big win for Bigfoot Networks is the inclusion of the Killer E2100 network card. I’ve reviewed the card in the past and generally liked what it had to offer, especially on the software side. Having the technology onboard the motherboard is a nice little touch.

Besides networking, the G1.Assassin has you covered in the sound department with the Creative X-Fi onboard as well. With a quality NIC and sound card on board, you’re free to use the expansion slots for other items.

On the back, you can see the requisite connectors with four USB 2.0 and four USB 3.0 connectors. The G1.Assassin is also going to include front bay unit that will give you a few more USB connections as well as a powered eSATA connector.

Speaking of SATA, G1.Assassin will have six SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps connections for plenty of hard drive or optical drive connections.

Since this is a gaming motherboard, overclocking will be a part of the setup so expect some software and hardware to help you achieve stable and high overclocks. Along the lines of the gaming theme, the G1.Assassin features a nice black and green color scheme. Although whether you think the color scheme looks good is subjective, I personally like the look. The G1.Assassin is the top of the line that Gigabyte will be coming out for gamers rocking the previous generation Intel processors.

If you don’t need all those PCI-E slots and the 16 power phase support that the G1.Assassin has, there’s the G1.Sniper for you. It has three PCI-E full sized slots and 8-power phase support being the main differences from the big brother. It’s also a regular ATX sized motherboard as well.

Finally, there’s the G1.Guerrilla, which substitutes the Creative X-Fi for a Realtek ALC 889 audio solution. Both the G1.Guerrilla and G1.Sniper support three way SLI or three way Crossfire with the three PCI-E full sized slots.

Gigabyte’s really trying for the hardcore gaming enthusiast space and I hope they do well with the G1.Killer Gaming Series of motherboards. Now, lets see some P67 motherboards in this line please.