GIGABYTE G1.Assassin

Introduction

Even after the release of the new Sandy Bridge platform's P67 Express chipset (codenamed Cougar Point), vendors continue to push their older Tylersburg X58 chipsets and add features that have not yet been seen on even top of the line X58 motherboards. GIGABYTE received a lot of feedback from gamers about what they need to dominate in their games. Based on this, GIGABYTE decided to start a new line-up of gaming motherboards running the X58 chipset: the G1.Killer series motherboards. In this review, we will be taking a look at the G1.Assassin, GIGABYTE's flagship gaming motherboard, which comes with 4 PCI-Express slots to enable users to take advantage of 4-way CrossFireX or 3-way SLI support. With a pricetag of $529.99 at Newegg.com, a lot of people might consider this motherboard highly overpriced, however, throughout this review we will explain why these motherboards are actually quite affordable for an enthusiast gamer. 

What do Gamers need?

A Dedicated Network Platform

A lot of gamers attend LAN parties and other events that require a fast PC and network connection. Many systems can be configured to run extremely fast (especially when the gamer is not playing online), however once the gamers go online or play games with their friends at a LAN party, they come accross a very annoying problem. The problem is that the network card bottlenecks the game performance through a high latency (PING) during gaming, and also by lowering the overall average frames per second the system will render. A good latency in a game means that there are a lot less lags and unexpected jumps while playing the game. For example, a user playing a racing game could expect another driver to be at a given point because they are driving at a constant speed. Then, a few seconds later, the gamer notices that the racer is far ahead of him or perhaps even crashing into him because the network had a high latency. This means that the network took a long time to send and receive the packets the game required to accurately position each car on the track, leading to a millisecond- or second-long lag. While this may not seem like much, it prevents the game from accurately syncing up with the other user. Another example would be first person shooter games like the Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Battlefield series: a user could be shooting at another gamer, not knowing that the reason he isn't scoring a kill point is because his target is somewhere else entirely, but the user's network is too slow to keep up with that change. Network lags don't really depend on the actual bandwidth of the network (i.e. 100Mbps) but rather on the network latency (i.e. PING: 104ms). Sometimes, because of these latency problems, a user may experience large drops in their frames per second, which will also cause a very bad gaming experience.

The GIGABYTE G1.Killer motherboards, including the G1.Assassin, come with a dedicated network processor and memory, which offload the network load from the CPU and bypass the Windows networking stack commands. This provides for a lower latency for gamers, provides dedicated processing power for the network, and frees up CPU power previously occupied by the network. The G1.Assassin comes with the Bigfoot Killer E2100 Network Processing Unit and a 1GB (2 x 512MB) network memory which will try to prevent any major lags and latency problems duing gaming. We'll go into more detail about the the Killer E2100 NPU on the following pages.

A Dedicated Audio Solution

We all know that the onboard Realtek audio that most X58 (and newer) motherboards come with are not high quality compared to PCI or PCI-Express dedicated audio cards, such as the ASUS Xonar, Creative X-Fi and Oxygen chip based audio cards. Usually, these dedicated audio cards also come with audio memory, high quality capacitors, and excellent analog-to-digital signal converters. The onboard Realtek audio chips just cannot compete with the quality, performance advantages, and audio frequency response that some of these cards can provide. They allow gamers to hear noises in games that were not inaudible before, and enjoy the gaming experience even more with a richer sound than before.

This is where GIGABYTE's Creative's Audio Processing Unit comes into the picture. GIGABYTE implemented the Creative 20K2 onto their G1.Assassin motherboard. The motherboard also has 128MB dedicated  memory just for the audio. This will reduce the overall system memory being used, provide fast processing for the Creative Audio processor, and free up CPU cycles for gaming and other applications. But GIGABYTE did not stop there. They used high quality Nichicon MUSE ES and MW series Bi-Polarized audio capacitors and analog-to-digital amplifiers for the audio to provide even better volume and quality for headphones that don't have any other amplification source. We'll have more about the G1.Assassin's audio on the following pages.

What else?

It's nice that GIGABYTE provided the users with dedicated Network and Audio processors, not to mention memory for each. This helps lower CPU cycles, and lower overall system memory usage, but GIGABYTE went one step further. They kept the features provided on their top of the line X58 boards, like 16-Phase Power and Driver MOSFETs for lower temperatures and powerful and stable overclocking; USB 3.0 and SATA III 6Gb/s port support; and even 4-way CrossFireX and 3-way SLI support. Continue reading to learn more about the goodies the G1.Assassin offers.