Gigabyte G1.Sniper2 Z68 Motherboard Review

The board uses an ATX form factor and a black PCB, which straight away is “winning” in my books. The addition of the black and lime green colour scheme screams out and is something you’ll remember for a long time and will either be loved or hated and is likely to be the latest Marmite debate amongst the community. Being honest, I LOVE it and feel that it has a slight essence of the DFI LANParty days with their neon glow accents and connectors and this is no different. How well it will integrate with your other components is going to be a tricky one, but GeIL are now producing memory with green heatspreaders, so that’s a start.

As of late, we’ve seen a lot of boards freeing up the CPU socket area, and ditching the large cooling blocks to provide a more spacious feel. Gigabyte have done the complete opposite with this board, yet it still works extremely well. The whole socket area is surrounded by some quite chunky heatsinks which follow on the colour scheme, yet the room around the socket is still large enough for some major cooling.

One of the heatsinks includes five LEDs that light up once the board is running and gives some free lighting effects that would normally be catered for with the likes of cold cathodes and other similar products.

The memory slots are another area that takes advantage of the crazy green colour scheme and includes support for up to 32GB of DDR3. Speeds that this board supports is from DDR3 1066MHz all the way up to 2133MHz but of course can be overclocked and naturally being an Intel board, also supports Intel XMP certified modules so that the SPD settings can be loaded straight in with ease.

The expansion slots area is another key point of the board as it keeps up with the funky contrasting colours and is obviously an area that most readers will find exciting to see what the board offers in terms of configurations. Starting towards the top, we find a PCI-Express x1 slot, PCI-Express x16 slot and another x1 slot just beneath. For older type expansion cards, a legacy PCI slot is also included, with another at the bottom. Also we find another x16 looking slot, but it is only capable of running at x8 speeds due to the Z68 chipset. Other boards have got around this by implementing an Nvidia NF200 chip to give the extra bandwidth where needed.

In their typical locations, we find all of our front panel connectors at the bottom of the board. This includes front panel Audio, USB, COM port, TPM and the normal front panel switches and LED’s. There is also a header for the OC button which refers to the front bay panel that came included and we also find a couple of fan headers for providing your system with sufficient cooling.