GIGABYTE G1 Assassin Physical Review
On Valentine's Day I arrived home from work to a great surprise, the GIGABYTE G1 Assassin board had finally arrived from GB HQ in Taiwan, sorry it took so long to get something up, but I do(or have to) celebrate Valentine's day. Now, before I opened the package, I made a promise to look at this board from a gamer's perspective and not an overclockers, something that is extremely hard to do. Many times as I went over the feature set, and I tried to figure out a few very important questions:
Why are there 5 audio amplifiers?
How many ICs do you need to integrate the new 20K2 Creative Audio Processor?
Why are there so many LEDs, 4 auxiliary temp sensors, and 5 controllable fan ports?
Why are there two hardware monitoring chips?
What is a Marvell SE9182(not SE9128)?
A new NEC USB 3.0 controller with 4 USB 3.0 ports instead of 2?
How do you make a NIC bypass windows networking and physically take control of the situation?
LEDs in the heatsink?
Once you have taken a thorough look at the board you begin to realize how well GIGABYTE designed this new motherboard, you really begin to realize how much engineering and time went into planning and building this ultimate gaming motherboard. GIGABYTE has taken a year's work of sampling the gaming world and built a motherboard especially for gamers. They didn't go about this by picking one gamer; no, the gaming world is too big. Instead they asked publicly what gamers would want in a motherboard(like on Facebook), and today I will show you what a year of planning, engineering, and testing has led to, possibly one of the world best gaming motherboards.
One thing that also should be mentioned is that GIGABYTE worked hand in hand with BIGFOOT Networks and CREATIVE Labs to incorporate the newest audio and LAN capabilities into probably one of the most extreme gaming motherboards.
Many motherboard makers are stuck at a point wondering who buys our motherboards? Who are these system builders and why are they buying our boards over the competition. Aside from large corporations such as Dell, your mind automatically goes to amateur systems engineers, those who determine which motherboards are the best for their final computer. Now over the past several years we have seen a trend where motherboards are bought by not only the general public who want to save a few bucks, but they are also purchased by enthusiasts like ourselves, those who don't necessarily care about how cheap something is, but how well it suits our needs. GIGABYTE has done just that, they have focused in on two of the most important (for me at least) market segments that many other manufacturers overlook, Gamers and Overclockers. While I am the latter (OCer) there are many Gamers who can benefit from the way I do reviews, in the end a motherboard is a motherboard and you need to know how it works and what it specifically offers to make the right buying decision. Today we will take an in depth look into the new G1 series of gaming boards, featuring the GIGABYTE G1 Assassin. This review is a physical review, it will have nothing to do with BIOS/Operation/Performance, and it will solely show you what the board has to offer and how it works. Performance review will follow shortly.
Follow me as I take a look at this motherboard as an amateur systems engineer would, looking for what makes this motherboard stand out and what it offers that could benefit my needs.
Unboxing/ Accessories:
Honestly, the box is huge, but then again this motherboard is huge, its XL-ATX form factor is why.
The box is very well designed, sticking to a gaming theme.
The up-close of the back will help you read about many of this board's features.
Open up the box and this is what you get, a nice window into the heart of your new system.
Here you see that stickers and poster are included among other things. The poster is double sided in case you want a different theme. Again this is exactly what I would want included if I were a gamer; case stickers are popular among case modders.
Here is the hung poster.
Back to accessories, a few things I want to point out. GIGABYTE is finally giving us black SATA cables!!! There is also a CrossFireX bridge along with the SLI and 3-Way SLI bridges. GIGABYTE also includes front panel with OC button as well as the usual driver disc and manuals.
Something very new for GIGABYTE is the OC button, GIGABYTE is one of the last remaining motherboard manufacturers to actually manufacture their own motherboards, it is pretty hard for them to produce a separate OC board, but they have provided gamers with a button, which has its own special connector. You can also see that we have an eSATA/USB dual plug as well as a USB 3.0 connector!
Layout:
As many of you know GIGABYTE has taken a turn for the better by incorporating a black matte PCB, this black addition to the PCB doesn't allow the copper traces to bleed through like many other "black" motherboards. All we have here is an actually smooth, non-reflective, and well-fitting PCB. Now this motherboard not only has more LEDs than I can count on my fingers and toes, it also has 5 dedicated 4-pin controllable fan ports, and 4 auxiliary temperature sensors. Even for OCers the temperature of the motherboard areas is potentially useful.
Here is my graphical depiction for you guys, it's a very busy board and we haven't even gotten to the interesting stuff yet! :
Of course you cannot see the temperature sensors, but those are all in prime locations to give the user great information of how air is flowing throughout the case and over the board. I have to say this is the first GIGABYTE board I have owned with 5 controllable fan headers, 4 auxiliary temp sensors, and this many L.E.D.s. I got to say bravo, because this is what gamers really like; the ability to turn off the LEDs are there, and you know more can never hurt in the fan header and temp sensor region.
Moving on the physical layout of the board lets first begin with the back panel.
I am not going to lie, the back panel is a bit less than I thought it would be. We have great USB 3.0 connectivity, 4 ports(Blue), and then 4 more ports of USB 2.0. PS2 is there, which I personally like as an Overclocker (so i can turn off USB controllers/BIOS backup flash), but I guess if you are a gamer and have multiple USB devices and have secondary KB/M then it might be useful, I know it is pretty useful to me as an overclocker. I should point out that this is not a dedicated OC board, so there is no clear CMOS button on this back panel. A few great things I really, really, really need to point out because it caught my eye almost at the end of the photo-shoot.
Notice that the USB and RJ-45 LAN port combination looks much different than the second set of USB 2.0(black USB) ports. That is because while the single pair of USB 2.0 ports is made by Foxconn, GIGABYTE chose to use the higher quality UDE parts for the LAN, they also used Lottes for the USB 3.0 ports, and Lottes for the audio ports, keeping quality at its highest. The problem in most modern electrical systems these days is not necessarily the chips processing the data, but more their physical implementation. For instance GPUs use traces that make contact with pads inside the PCI-E slot, the weakest link in terms of power and even many times performance is the quality of this contact. There just isn't enough contact to power modern day GPUs and that is why we see extra power connectors, as well as modders adding more power inputs. For a gamer it can relate into the reason why so many high speed data cables need to be kept short.
GIGABYTE advertises 2oz PCB for a very important reason, more copper you have the easier it is for electrons to travel (lower impedance) and this theoretically leads to better performance of the electrical subsystem. Things such as the connectors being high quality really show how dedicated GIGABYTE is to this board's LAN, Audio, and USB subsystems.
In the picture above you can also see the dual 8pin CPU power connector as well, something only seen on the best of the best boards out there. Other than the X58A-UD9 there is no current board in the X58 GIGABYTE line (other than upcoming OC Board *fingers crossed) that will have this extra connector to further enhance the ability for more electricity to flow.
Above we see GIGABYTE and the well tested Lottes CPU socket which is usually preferred for sub-zero overclocks on X58 and P55 platforms.
For the gamers out there, you hear about phases when talking about a motherboard's power delivery, and the CPU, RAM, IOH, and even parts of the CPU have their own Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) each with a certain amount of phases. The traditional way to count phases is by counting the number of chokes (inductors). Now almost all boards use inductors that are square and black instead of the traditional open/wound coil. You can see 16 of them around the heatsinks around the CPU, 4 to the top of the socket in the picture above. I will go more in depth about the VRMs this board has to offer in a little bit. I would like to note that the CPU socket area is pretty much standard and will accommodate even the largest coolers.
There is a nice amount of room between the socket and the RAM slots. As you can see these slots follow the green/black color theme of the motherboard. At that white balance and saturation I think the camera perfectly picked up on the slot's green color.
This board has an ATX-XL form factor, which is reserved for some of the most extreme boards out there. I have a dual CPU server motherboard(old) that isn't even this long. One huge benefit to this board's length is that spacing the PCI-E slots is much easier. On this board you can pop in two triple slotted GPUs and have them both run at 16x,16x. The slots use the very easy snap in, and press to release method for locking in the GPUs; it makes life much easier when trying to remove your GPU. In this picture you can also see both 4- Pin molex connector housings for extra PCI-E power at either end of the PCI-E slots. The first and last both have one right next to them, and you just plug and play. Also notice that there is a PCI slot and two PCI-E 1x slots, even though this board already has some of the best Audio and LAN you could ever want you might want to use these ports for extras(I can't really think of anything other than some advanced multiple output network cards and RAID cards). That is kind of the point of this board, its already got everything a gamer would ever need!
Now here is where the connectivity comes into play, we have in black 6 SATA3GB/s connectors; they are very fast and will provide the best performance for your SATA Revision II (3GB/s) HDDs or SSDs. Not to be confused with SATA6GB/s (SATA revision III), which should only be used with SATA6GB/s SSDs.
I took separate pictures of the connectors so that you can click and zoom in, on the left we have the external front panel audio connectors, as well as the Molex power for PCI-E, and a fan header. On the picture on the right (from left to right) we have two USB 3.0 external connectors, and two USB 2.0 connectors, as well as all your front panel case connectors as well as another fan connector.
On the left we have the OC front panel connector for the OC button. This has never been on a GIGABYTE board before, it's brand new. On the right you have the power connector for the LEDs inside the main heatsink.
We have it with and without heatsink. There was once a company geared towards gamers called DFI. They built some of the most gorgeous motherboards, they had the best color schemes. Sadly DFI went out of business a few years ago. GIGABYTE didn't copy DFI's color scheme because their color scheme always had neon parts, and was just a bit too flashy. GIGABYTE has modestly brought back a really great color scheme. Green and black is really a staple for gamers and video games. The addition of the gun-part shaped heatsinks is a nice touch. It is a very nice change from GIGABYTE's blue theme, and a nicer change from other manufacturers red and black, but it comes down to personal decision.
Let's move on to power delivery.
Power Delivery:
Power delivery has turned out to be one of the most exciting subjects there is for normal motherboards. Of course for this board the most exciting are the Audio and LAN capabilities, but for right now we will focus on how every microchip gets its power. Obviously you cannot just plug straight 12v power from your power supply into the traces for the processor; the 12v voltage first needs to go to some capacitors (reduce ripple/fluctuation), then the power theoretically goes into MOSFETs (which will perform a DC/DC conversion), and then the power goes through chokes or inductors (to clean up the noise), and finally through another set of capacitors (to further reduce ripple/fluctuation).
On Valentine's Day I arrived home from work to a great surprise, the GIGABYTE G1 Assassin board had finally arrived from GB HQ in Taiwan, sorry it took so long to get something up, but I do(or have to) celebrate Valentine's day. Now, before I opened the package, I made a promise to look at this board from a gamer's perspective and not an overclockers, something that is extremely hard to do. Many times as I went over the feature set, and I tried to figure out a few very important questions:
Why are there 5 audio amplifiers?
How many ICs do you need to integrate the new 20K2 Creative Audio Processor?
Why are there so many LEDs, 4 auxiliary temp sensors, and 5 controllable fan ports?
Why are there two hardware monitoring chips?
What is a Marvell SE9182(not SE9128)?
A new NEC USB 3.0 controller with 4 USB 3.0 ports instead of 2?
How do you make a NIC bypass windows networking and physically take control of the situation?
LEDs in the heatsink?
Once you have taken a thorough look at the board you begin to realize how well GIGABYTE designed this new motherboard, you really begin to realize how much engineering and time went into planning and building this ultimate gaming motherboard. GIGABYTE has taken a year's work of sampling the gaming world and built a motherboard especially for gamers. They didn't go about this by picking one gamer; no, the gaming world is too big. Instead they asked publicly what gamers would want in a motherboard(like on Facebook), and today I will show you what a year of planning, engineering, and testing has led to, possibly one of the world best gaming motherboards.
One thing that also should be mentioned is that GIGABYTE worked hand in hand with BIGFOOT Networks and CREATIVE Labs to incorporate the newest audio and LAN capabilities into probably one of the most extreme gaming motherboards.
Many motherboard makers are stuck at a point wondering who buys our motherboards? Who are these system builders and why are they buying our boards over the competition. Aside from large corporations such as Dell, your mind automatically goes to amateur systems engineers, those who determine which motherboards are the best for their final computer. Now over the past several years we have seen a trend where motherboards are bought by not only the general public who want to save a few bucks, but they are also purchased by enthusiasts like ourselves, those who don't necessarily care about how cheap something is, but how well it suits our needs. GIGABYTE has done just that, they have focused in on two of the most important (for me at least) market segments that many other manufacturers overlook, Gamers and Overclockers. While I am the latter (OCer) there are many Gamers who can benefit from the way I do reviews, in the end a motherboard is a motherboard and you need to know how it works and what it specifically offers to make the right buying decision. Today we will take an in depth look into the new G1 series of gaming boards, featuring the GIGABYTE G1 Assassin. This review is a physical review, it will have nothing to do with BIOS/Operation/Performance, and it will solely show you what the board has to offer and how it works. Performance review will follow shortly.
Follow me as I take a look at this motherboard as an amateur systems engineer would, looking for what makes this motherboard stand out and what it offers that could benefit my needs.
Unboxing/ Accessories:
Honestly, the box is huge, but then again this motherboard is huge, its XL-ATX form factor is why.
The box is very well designed, sticking to a gaming theme.
The up-close of the back will help you read about many of this board's features.
Open up the box and this is what you get, a nice window into the heart of your new system.
Here you see that stickers and poster are included among other things. The poster is double sided in case you want a different theme. Again this is exactly what I would want included if I were a gamer; case stickers are popular among case modders.
Here is the hung poster.
Back to accessories, a few things I want to point out. GIGABYTE is finally giving us black SATA cables!!! There is also a CrossFireX bridge along with the SLI and 3-Way SLI bridges. GIGABYTE also includes front panel with OC button as well as the usual driver disc and manuals.
Something very new for GIGABYTE is the OC button, GIGABYTE is one of the last remaining motherboard manufacturers to actually manufacture their own motherboards, it is pretty hard for them to produce a separate OC board, but they have provided gamers with a button, which has its own special connector. You can also see that we have an eSATA/USB dual plug as well as a USB 3.0 connector!
Layout:
As many of you know GIGABYTE has taken a turn for the better by incorporating a black matte PCB, this black addition to the PCB doesn't allow the copper traces to bleed through like many other "black" motherboards. All we have here is an actually smooth, non-reflective, and well-fitting PCB. Now this motherboard not only has more LEDs than I can count on my fingers and toes, it also has 5 dedicated 4-pin controllable fan ports, and 4 auxiliary temperature sensors. Even for OCers the temperature of the motherboard areas is potentially useful.
Here is my graphical depiction for you guys, it's a very busy board and we haven't even gotten to the interesting stuff yet! :
Of course you cannot see the temperature sensors, but those are all in prime locations to give the user great information of how air is flowing throughout the case and over the board. I have to say this is the first GIGABYTE board I have owned with 5 controllable fan headers, 4 auxiliary temp sensors, and this many L.E.D.s. I got to say bravo, because this is what gamers really like; the ability to turn off the LEDs are there, and you know more can never hurt in the fan header and temp sensor region.
Moving on the physical layout of the board lets first begin with the back panel.
I am not going to lie, the back panel is a bit less than I thought it would be. We have great USB 3.0 connectivity, 4 ports(Blue), and then 4 more ports of USB 2.0. PS2 is there, which I personally like as an Overclocker (so i can turn off USB controllers/BIOS backup flash), but I guess if you are a gamer and have multiple USB devices and have secondary KB/M then it might be useful, I know it is pretty useful to me as an overclocker. I should point out that this is not a dedicated OC board, so there is no clear CMOS button on this back panel. A few great things I really, really, really need to point out because it caught my eye almost at the end of the photo-shoot.
Notice that the USB and RJ-45 LAN port combination looks much different than the second set of USB 2.0(black USB) ports. That is because while the single pair of USB 2.0 ports is made by Foxconn, GIGABYTE chose to use the higher quality UDE parts for the LAN, they also used Lottes for the USB 3.0 ports, and Lottes for the audio ports, keeping quality at its highest. The problem in most modern electrical systems these days is not necessarily the chips processing the data, but more their physical implementation. For instance GPUs use traces that make contact with pads inside the PCI-E slot, the weakest link in terms of power and even many times performance is the quality of this contact. There just isn't enough contact to power modern day GPUs and that is why we see extra power connectors, as well as modders adding more power inputs. For a gamer it can relate into the reason why so many high speed data cables need to be kept short.
GIGABYTE advertises 2oz PCB for a very important reason, more copper you have the easier it is for electrons to travel (lower impedance) and this theoretically leads to better performance of the electrical subsystem. Things such as the connectors being high quality really show how dedicated GIGABYTE is to this board's LAN, Audio, and USB subsystems.
In the picture above you can also see the dual 8pin CPU power connector as well, something only seen on the best of the best boards out there. Other than the X58A-UD9 there is no current board in the X58 GIGABYTE line (other than upcoming OC Board *fingers crossed) that will have this extra connector to further enhance the ability for more electricity to flow.
Above we see GIGABYTE and the well tested Lottes CPU socket which is usually preferred for sub-zero overclocks on X58 and P55 platforms.
For the gamers out there, you hear about phases when talking about a motherboard's power delivery, and the CPU, RAM, IOH, and even parts of the CPU have their own Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) each with a certain amount of phases. The traditional way to count phases is by counting the number of chokes (inductors). Now almost all boards use inductors that are square and black instead of the traditional open/wound coil. You can see 16 of them around the heatsinks around the CPU, 4 to the top of the socket in the picture above. I will go more in depth about the VRMs this board has to offer in a little bit. I would like to note that the CPU socket area is pretty much standard and will accommodate even the largest coolers.
There is a nice amount of room between the socket and the RAM slots. As you can see these slots follow the green/black color theme of the motherboard. At that white balance and saturation I think the camera perfectly picked up on the slot's green color.
This board has an ATX-XL form factor, which is reserved for some of the most extreme boards out there. I have a dual CPU server motherboard(old) that isn't even this long. One huge benefit to this board's length is that spacing the PCI-E slots is much easier. On this board you can pop in two triple slotted GPUs and have them both run at 16x,16x. The slots use the very easy snap in, and press to release method for locking in the GPUs; it makes life much easier when trying to remove your GPU. In this picture you can also see both 4- Pin molex connector housings for extra PCI-E power at either end of the PCI-E slots. The first and last both have one right next to them, and you just plug and play. Also notice that there is a PCI slot and two PCI-E 1x slots, even though this board already has some of the best Audio and LAN you could ever want you might want to use these ports for extras(I can't really think of anything other than some advanced multiple output network cards and RAID cards). That is kind of the point of this board, its already got everything a gamer would ever need!
Now here is where the connectivity comes into play, we have in black 6 SATA3GB/s connectors; they are very fast and will provide the best performance for your SATA Revision II (3GB/s) HDDs or SSDs. Not to be confused with SATA6GB/s (SATA revision III), which should only be used with SATA6GB/s SSDs.
I took separate pictures of the connectors so that you can click and zoom in, on the left we have the external front panel audio connectors, as well as the Molex power for PCI-E, and a fan header. On the picture on the right (from left to right) we have two USB 3.0 external connectors, and two USB 2.0 connectors, as well as all your front panel case connectors as well as another fan connector.
On the left we have the OC front panel connector for the OC button. This has never been on a GIGABYTE board before, it's brand new. On the right you have the power connector for the LEDs inside the main heatsink.
We have it with and without heatsink. There was once a company geared towards gamers called DFI. They built some of the most gorgeous motherboards, they had the best color schemes. Sadly DFI went out of business a few years ago. GIGABYTE didn't copy DFI's color scheme because their color scheme always had neon parts, and was just a bit too flashy. GIGABYTE has modestly brought back a really great color scheme. Green and black is really a staple for gamers and video games. The addition of the gun-part shaped heatsinks is a nice touch. It is a very nice change from GIGABYTE's blue theme, and a nicer change from other manufacturers red and black, but it comes down to personal decision.
Let's move on to power delivery.
Power Delivery:
Power delivery has turned out to be one of the most exciting subjects there is for normal motherboards. Of course for this board the most exciting are the Audio and LAN capabilities, but for right now we will focus on how every microchip gets its power. Obviously you cannot just plug straight 12v power from your power supply into the traces for the processor; the 12v voltage first needs to go to some capacitors (reduce ripple/fluctuation), then the power theoretically goes into MOSFETs (which will perform a DC/DC conversion), and then the power goes through chokes or inductors (to clean up the noise), and finally through another set of capacitors (to further reduce ripple/fluctuation).