Gigabyte G1.Killer Series Meets Sandy Bridge with New G1.Sniper 2 Motherboard

Gigabyte released pictures of G1.Sniper 2, the company's first socket LGA1155 motherboard in the G1.Killer series of motherboards designed for gamers with overclocker alter-egos (the same market ASUS Republic of Gamers targets). The board is based on the Intel Z68 Express chipset without any additional PCI-E bridge chip such as NVIDIA nForce 200. The board supports 2nd generation Core "Sandy Bridge" LGA1155 processors. The first G1.Sniper was a LGA1366 motherboard based on Intel X58 chipset.

Apart from being yet another high-end 2-way SLI/CrossFire Z68 motherboard, which Gigabyte's mainline Z68X series motherboards already achieve, the G1.Sniper 2 packs two extremely gamer-specific onboard devices: the Bigfoot Killer E2100 low-latency, high-offload PCI-Express network controller with its of dedicated memory; and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi hardware audio with CA20K2 PCIe processor and 64 MB XRAM, backed by a high-grade Cirrus Logic DAC and OPAMP circuit, driving signal-noise ratio easily above 105 dBA with punchy bass.

That aside, the G1.Sniper 2 is your typical high-end LGA1155 motherboard, with 12-phase CPU VRM, 2-phase for the dual-channel DDR3 memory; expansion slots that include two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x8/x8 when both are populated), two each of PCI-E x1 and legacy PCI; storage connectivity that include two SATA 6 Gb/s, five SATA 3 Gb/s, one power eSATA; four USB 3.0 ports (two by header), and HDMI being the lone display output. Given that Killer E2100 and SB X-Fi are together worth well over $200 when purchased as separate add-on cards, one can expect this to be the most expensive LGA1155 motherboard from Gigabyte, yet.

Source