Gigabyte G1.Assassin 2 Motherboard Review

The G1.Assassin 2 is a standard ATX sized motherboard, measuring 30.5cm x 26.4cm. The first thing you’ll notice on the board is the spacious design, with ample space bet1en the CPU area and the first PCI Express slot. The entire CPU area is, in fact, shifted towards the right side of the board, with 4 DIMM slots supporting a maximum of 32GB DDR3 2133MHz RAM.

The second thing you’ll notice is that there are only 3 PCI Express slots on here. The reason, as far as I can tell, is simply that the Bigfoot Killer E2100 network card and its two 512MB DDR2 memory modules are taking up a lot of space. The PCIe x1 slot for the provided Bluetooth + WiFi card will most likely get eaten up if you’re planning to run a 3-way SLI or CFX setup.

Coming to the heatsink design, I understand why they have used the pistol design to cover the chipset, given the name of the motherboard itself, but it really looks cheesy. Thankfully, you won’t see much of it once you put in your graphics card(s).

Moving below we can see the front panel headers, the three front USB 2.0 headers, and the TPM and front audio panel headers. The Creative CA20K2-2AG HF audio chipset is just a little above the headers, with its 128MB DDR SD Hynix RAM module; supporting 8-channel X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity and EAX Advanced HD 5.0 audio formats.

Creeping further up are the Nichicon MUSE ES and MW capacitors with their own little shield wall to prevent power and signal interference. This is where the rear I/O panel begins with the audio ports, six USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports and the LAN port. You will also notice the CPU overclocking button, the BIOS indicator (to show which of the two BIOSes you’re running) and the Clear CMOS button.

Adjacent to all these headers are the eight SATA ports. Starting off with the six ports on the front, the two in white are SATA 3 while the four in black are SATA 2; all controlled by the Intel chipset. The grey colored Marvell 88SE9172 controlled SATA 3 ports are near the very bottom, perhaps inaccessible in some cases. At the opposite side is the front USB 3.0 panel header and the 24-pin ATX power port.

Overall, the black and bright green color combination looks pretty good, and the cheesy heatsink design notwithstanding, the board layout is pretty impressive.