Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X Motherboard Review

Today we are going to look at one of the first Socket FM2+ motherboards designed for gaming, the Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X. This has similar characteristics as the other products in Gigabyte's gaming range, including the trademark green and black colour scheme. As its name suggests, the Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X features the AMD A88X chipset and supports all of the latest ‘Richland’ APUs, as well as the previous generation models. This is a fully-featured ATX motherboard which has a number of high end capabilities such as LED-lighting and CrossFire support. We are excited to see how well the G1 Sniper A88X overclocks, as we have achieved some impressive results from more mainstream-focused Gigabyte motherboards in the past. Features Socket FM2+ supports AMD FM2+/FM2 A-series APU GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 4 Plus Technology GIGABYTE UEFI DualBIOS™ GIGABYTE AMP-UP Audio technology Exclusive Upgradable OP-AMP Exclusive Gain Boost Audio Noise Guard with LED path lighting Nichicon High End Audio Capacitors Noise-less USB DAC-UP port 2way CrossFire™ Support HDMI, Dual-link DVI, D-sub ports for Triple-Monitor support High ESD Protection on GbE LAN and USB ports Realtek ALC898 with High Quality 110dB SNR HD audio Bundle CFOS Speed Internet Accelerator Software The Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X is supplied in a standard-sized motherboard-style box which is decorated in an attractive black livery. The top of the box doesn't feature any images of the motherboard, however the G1 Sniper branding is very prominent. Turning the box over reveals a large diagram of the motherboard which is used to highlight all of the key features. There is also a table of key specifications displayed in the bottom right hand corner. Inside the box there is a fairly limited selection of accessories included considering this is a gaming model. All we find is a couple of SATA-600 cables, an I/O plate and the usual user manuals. The G1 Sniper A88X features a green and black colour scheme, similar to the other products in Gigabyte's G1 Sniper range. It should be fairly simple to colour co-ordinate other system components with this motherboard if you put in a little effort. Even though this is one of Gigabyte's high-end motherboards, there is only a modest heatsink covering the VRM circuitry around the CPU Socket. The CPU power connector is located in the corner of the motherboard next to the heatsink. The CPU socket is located in the usual place on the motherboard, surrounded on either side by the stock AMD CPU cooler mounting brackets. The four DDR3 memory slots are located along the right-hand edge of the motherboard and support up to 64 GB of memory with frequencies of 2133/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz. We find the 24-pin power connector in the usual position to the right of the memory slots, alongside an internal USB3.0 header. There are eight SATA-600 connectors in the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard. These are connected to the A88X chipset and support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, and JBOD configurations. Along the bottom edge of the motherboard we find an HD Audio header, a S-PDIF connector, a TPM connector, two USB2.0 headers and the front panel header. There are a generous selection of expansion slots on the motherboard. From top to bottom we find a PCI Express x1 slot, a PCI Express (3.0) x16 slot, two further PCI Express x1 slots, a PCI Express x16 slot running at x4 and two legacy PCI slots. On the rear I/O panel we find the following connections: 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port 2 x USB ports 1 x DVI-D port 1 x VGA port 1 x HDMI port 2 x USB 3.0 ports 3 x USB 2.0 ports 1 x RJ-45 port 1 x Optical S/PDIF Out connector 5 x Audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out, Rear Speaker Out, Line In, Line Out, Mic In) BIOS As you can see from the screenshots above, Gigabyte has used a fairly standard UEFI interface for the motherboard. All of the overclocking options are easily accessible, although we prefer the more comprehensive layout offered on Asus motherboards. Overclocking We managed to achieve a decent 4.6 GHz overclock with the AMD Vision A10-6800K (4.1 Ghz stock speed). This was achieved using a baseclock of 100 MHz with a multiplier of 46x. We left all settings at 'Auto' to achieve this. We tried overclocking past this and were able to get the system to boot at 4.8 GHz, however the Noctua U14S cooler wasn't able to keep the temperatures cool enough to keep the system stable. See validation here. In this review we are going to benchmark the AMD Vision A10-6800K at reference clock speeds (4.1 GHz) and when overclocked to 4.6 GHz, as detailed on the previous page. Test System: Processor: AMD Vision A10-6800K Motherboard: Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X Cooler: Noctua U14S Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2 Memory: 8 GB AMD Radeon Gaming Memory 2133 MHz Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 8670D Power Supply: Silverstone Platinum 1000W System Drive: Intel SSD 330 Series 120 GB Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Software: PCMark 7 3DMark 3DMark 11 3DMark Vantage SiSoft Sandra 2013 Cinebench R11.5 CrystalDiskMark Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.7 VLC Media Player Performance Monitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Super Pi 1.5 Mod CPUID Hardware Monitor CPU-Z GPU-Z WinRAR DiRT Showdown Battlefield 3 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PCMark 8 is the latest version in the popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes battery life measurement tools and new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. These results show how overclocking can boost system-wide performance. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. In this test we can see a slight bump in performance when the system was overclocked. 3DMark is Futuremark’s latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS. With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs. We used the ‘Fire Strike’ benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for the Normal setting, NOT the Extreme mode. An impressive score in this test considering that this system is running on integrated graphics. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. Here we see similarly good results to the previous 3DMark test. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. As we would expect, overclocking significantly boosts the CPU score of the system. Here we see a decent boost in CPU performance when the system was overclocked. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit These results are exactly what we would expect for this system as configured. Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. Here we can see the benefits of using multi-threaded applications which are able to harness the power of all four cores. Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. AMD systems tend to perform badly in this test, however the scores are what we would expect considering this. WinRAR is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads. We can see that there is a decent boost in the amount of data processed when overclocked. The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in VLC or Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We played our 1080P MKV movie using the latest version of VLC Media Player and measured the CPU usage with the Performance Monitor built into Windows. In this test we see a slight reduction in CPU usage when overclocked. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. For our testing today we are converting a 1.43 GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device using the Apple preset. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. Hardware acceleration was enabled to give you a good idea of system wide real world performance. This test lets us see the real world benefits of overclocking, with the time taken to convert our video file reduced considerably when overclocked. According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. These framerates are pretty impressive for a system with integrated graphics. Black Ops 2 is the latest episode in the Call of Duty franchise and is one of the most popular games of the moment. It uses an updated version of the IW engine, used in previous Call of Duty games, which isn't particularly demanding. This makes it ideal for testing mid-range gaming systems like this. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. Again, we see good performance in this game considering the system features integrated graphics. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing with all other settings set to the 'Low' presets. The system performed particularly well in DiRT, achieving impressive framerates. We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds. The power consumption is exactly what we would expect from the system. Overall we are impressed with what the Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X brings to the table. It is designed to cater to the enthusiast audience who want a high-performance gaming motherboard supporting the latest AMD APU's. The green and black colour scheme of the G1 Sniper A88X is very distinctive and is sure to appeal to gamers - we love the recent Gigabyte motherboard colour schemes. There are plenty of other green components available on the market so it will be easy to build a colour co-ordinated system. When it comes to overclocking, the G1 Sniper A88X is very competent. It was able to achieve a 4.6 GHz overclock without much effort, and we are sure that it is capable of more if you can fit a high end cooler. It is worth bearing in mind that many people buying an A88X system want something compact and affordable for a general purpose build, so spending £60 on a high level cooler may seem somewhat pointless. At a price of £90 from Overclockers UK, we feel that this motherboard is fairly well priced considering it's sophisticated feature set. We imagine that it will come down in price over the coming months as it's only just been released, which will make it very good value indeed! Pros: Green and black colour scheme. Good overclocking performance. Decent value for money. Cons: Needs an expensive cooler to make the most out of the overclocking abilities. KitGuru says: Another impressive motherboard from Gigabyte which offers good value for money.