Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by stefan @ 2014-06-23

The G1.Sniper 5 high-end Z87 board from Gigabyte is also available in a smaller form factor, while retaining some of the most important features like Killer NIC, dual BIOS, Creative Sound Core 3D DSP. The UEFI interface is pretty customizable, has three modes and features the same design as with the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5.

 

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A Closer Look Part III

The F_Panel headers are color coded so we can identify them much easier:

 

 

 

In the vicinity we have a large Z87 chipset heatsink, which sports the G1. Killer logo:

 

 

 

This board comes equipped with 6 SATA ports; the G1.Sniper 5 had 10 SATA ports, 4 which were controlled by a 88SE9230 6Gb/s SATA controller from Marvel:

 

 

 

Near the 24-pin ATX power connector we also have the LED display (Debug LED), along with one front USB 3.0 port header:

 

 

 

Besides the larger red Power button located on the top right side of the PCB, we will also get to find two BIOS switches, a Reset button which is accompanied by a CMOS Reset button:

 

 

 

The RAM slots are also color coded:

 

 

 

Between the slots and the VRM heatsink we will also get to see two additional 4-pin fan connectors:

 

 

 

On the I/O, we will get to find two USB 2.0 ports, one PS/2 combo port, one DVI, two HDMI and one DisplayPort output, four USB 3.0 ports, one LAN port but also the audio jacks which are backed by the Creative Sound Core 3D. Additionally, Gigabyte has also placed here one optical SPDIF connector:

 

 

 

Coming back at the same small issue we have encountered too with the G1.Sniper 5: the space between the CPU socket and the first PCI-Express slot is quite small and when installing beefy CPU coolers like the Noctua NH-D14 we must be attentive so the cooler won’t touch the back of the GPU in order to avoid short circuits which leads to permanent damage:

 

 

 

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