Gigabyte G1.Sniper Review

Performance Analysis

The G1.Sniper was quick out of the box, but then it needed to be in order to justify its exorbitant price tag. In our image editing test it was only 10 points behind the Asus Rampage III Gene, which is the quickest board we’ve seen in this test. It was also competent at video encoding, although the 3,294 points it scored here was more of a mid-table result.

Our multi-tasking test at stock speed again saw the G1.Sniper near the top of the table, but it was again behind the cheaper Rampage III Gene. This led to an overall Media Benchmark score of 2,080 points which, while only 1.2 per cent slower than the fastest stock result we’ve seen, was still only a mid-table result. Clearly at stock speeds there is very little to separate many of the X58 boards we’ve tested in terms of performance.


Unfortunately, for a board targeted at gamers, gaming performance wasn’t all that great. The minimum frame rate we saw in Crysis with the CPU at stock speed was 32fps, which was 5fps slower than the Sabertooth X58 and 6fps slower than the Rampage III Gene. The G1.Sniper’s SATA 6Gbps performance was also disappointing, with a read speed of only 308MB/sec from our 256GB C300 SSD; a drive that’s capable of 370MB/sec on better SATA 6Gbps ports.

At overclocked speeds, though, the G1.Sniper came into its own. It set some of the highest scores we’ve yet seen from an X58 motherboard in each of the sections of our Media Benchmark suite, culminating in an overall score of 2,644. Unfortunately, though, this boost in performance didn’t help the board’s lacklustre gaming performance. We did see an increase in frame rates from the overclock, but the board’s minimum of 43fps in Crysis was still 2fps off the 45fps we saw from the Asus Sabertooth X58.

Conclusion

Whatever you call the G1.Sniper, you certainly can’t call it slow. It’s a quick board that looks great and overclocks well - its performance isn’t in question. What is in question, however, is its price and how Gigabyte has arrived at that price.

This is because £360 is a hell of a lot to pay for a motherboard, especially one that only performs ever so slightly better than boards that cost half the price. Gigabyte would argue that the price is justified through all the extra features, such as the onboard sound processing, unique weapon styling and Bigfoot network controller. However, these aren't universally useful and inflate the price of the board to ludicrous levels.

It looks as though Gigabyte has misunderstood what gamers really want. The company has assumed that all gamers are mega-rich sugar addled teenagers who always want more; more buttons, more features, more lights and more options.

In reality, though, most gamers we know simply want reliability and value; they’re more interested in the actual gaming than in buying lights, buttons and faff. As a result, we think the G1.Sniper misses the headshot for which it's aiming.

There is potential in the G1 brand, and we'd love to see a stripped-down sub-£200 G1 board with the same distinctive styling and bold colour scheme. As far as the G1.Sniper goes, despite good performance and excellent overclocking, it’s just too overloaded with questionable features that make it far too expensive.

• Performance
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• 9/10

• Features
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• -
• 9/10

• Value
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• -
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• 4/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 6/10

Score Guide