Gigabyte’s G1 Sniper 3 smiles for the camera

Gigabyte first introduced the G1.Killer series on the X58 platform. Armed with a FPS theme, they presented their new series of boards with green and black colour theme and weapons inspired heatsinks. Not long after came the second wave of G1.Killer, this time for the Z68 platform. Now, it is only right for Gigabyte to continue this series of gamer-overclocker oriented motherboards with a new version. The Sniper was the first version to be remade for the Z68 platform, Gigabyte has done the same for the Z77 chipset with the G1.Sniper 3.

Staying on the LGA1155, it now makes use of the new chipset, which will bring some new features to work with Ivy Bridge processors. The Sniper 3 is designed to accommodate a lot of graphics power with the space for up to four graphics cards in 4-way CrossFire/SLI configurations. This is achieved with a PLX PEX8747 bridge chip, which allows for the 16 lanes from the CPU to be split up into two by 16 or four by eight configurations (in other words x16/NC/x16/NC; x16/NC/x8/x8; x8/x8/x8/x8). Two additional PCI-Express 2.0 1x and one legacy PCI can also be found.

As for the power, the CPU is powered by a 15-phase VRM. The CPU is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory. SATA ports are found in abundance here with six SATA 6 Gbps ports (two from the PCH, four from additional controllers), four SATA 3 Gbps and one mSATA 6 Gbps.

Gigabyte got rid of both the Creative X-Fi audio and Bigfoot Killer NIC to replace them with HD audio (probably Realtek ALC898), providing better ground-isolated amp circuitry and Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller (probably 82579V). There is also a second Gigabit Ethernet connection driven by a Realtek controller.

Connectivity isn’t lacking either, the display features the lot really, with DVI, D-Sub, HDMI and DisplayPort. USB ports on the rear are all USB 3.0, two more are featured as internal headers. USB 2.0 hasn’t disappeared with a number of internal headers provided. The board comes equipped with Gigabyte’s dual-UEFI BIOS with 3DBIOS UI. It also packs a whole bunch of features for overclockers including consolidated voltage measurement points, a feature-rich BIOS, and more.

While the green and black colour theme seems to have stuck, the weapons inspired heatsink seem to have disappeared…so far.

Obviously, no price tag, neither is there any release date, you’ll have to wait some more to get more details.

Source: TechPowerUp; Images: VR-Zone