Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Taking a first look at the board, the first thing you will notice is that it has a Micro-ATX form factor and has the green/black colour scheme that we’ve seen on previous G1 series motherboards across the range. Though we are looking at a Micro-ATX board, it doesn’t look as though anything has been skimped on.

Taking a look at the cooling that is present on the board we can see a single black passive heatsink around the CPU socket with a single 4-pin CPU power connector behind it. No other cooling is present around the socket leaving us wondering if this board is any good at overclocking.

The only other cooling that is on the board is down in the opposite corner, giving sufficient passive cooling to the Intel Z77 chipset. This is a low-profile heatsink allowing long graphics cards to be used and not to be obstructed in any way.

Memory wise, we see four DIMM slots in a typical dual-channel configuration. Two slots are black, while the other two are green to stick with the design and style on the rest of the board. The board supports up to 32GB of DDR3 of speeds up to DDR3 2400 (OC). Also in the usual place, you’ll find the 24-pin ATX power connector, a system fan header and native USB 3.0 header.

Moving down the board, we can see that even though a Micro-ATX form factor is used, the expansion slots didn’t suffer. We find a single black PCI-Express x1 slot in the middle, surrounded by three PCI-Express x16 slots, of which the first operates at x16 speeds, the second at x4 speeds and the third at x8 speeds. By using the first and third slots (x16 and x8) you can take advantage of AMD CrossFireX and Nvidia SLI technology.

Moving slightly further down, we can take a look at the various connectors including front panel audio, TPM, three USB 2.0 ports and the main front panel connectors.

Also close by that’s worth mentioning is the audio functionality. The audio area is surrounded by an EMI shield which splits the high-quality Creative CA0132 SoundCore3D chip away from any interference.

Taking a look at the storage on this board, we find a total of five SATA ports, of which two are white and support SATA 6Gb/s devices through the Z77 chipset. There is also a further three SATA ports (black) which support SATA 3Gb/s devices through the Intel Z77 chipset controller. All SATA ports also support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

Finishing with the rear I/O panel, we find a total of four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a PS/2 combo port, VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. An eSATA 3Gb/s connector is also on the rear as well as an Intel Gigabit provided LAN port, SPDIF and 5.1 channel sound through the Creative CA0132 chip and supports Sound Blaster Recon3Di.