With the latest Z77 chipset on board we take a look at the Gigabyte Sniper 3 and see if it matches its predecessors.

Continue Reading

lovely upgrade to the sniper range

Love this board, just wish it wasn't so damn expensive. With boards like the GD65 you have to ask if paying over double the price is worth it.

without a doubt that price WILL be half the price..... in 6months

someone has to pay for the nextgen research, that'll be available this xmas

I honestly can't believe how low your volts are for 4.8GHz...Jesus H Christ almighty.

Gigabyte have certainly done something right with this board.

A great review, Tom - looks as though I may have to devote more attention to the Sniper boards from now on.

I love this board so much, i'd love to have one. Performance wise this looks like the best Z77 board out there atm, and one of the best looking boards too

Looks like an amazing board but as the others have said, way out of my price range. I'm actually a fan of the fact they've not gone for gun shaped heatsinks etc. but that's prob just me

Oh no, I think there are a great many people amongst this forum who didn't like the marketing scheme that Gigabyte was employing.

Yep not many people on here were liking the gun shaped heatsinks.

Someone please tell me why such an expensive board should have VGA (or even DVI, for that matter)?

What a waste of I/O space. Gigabyte dun goofed.

Because there are a lot of people, myself included, who still use DVI. And, if my monitor was to fail, my back-up solution would be a VGA monitor of mine.

Mhm... And you're going to buy a board like this, but not buy a graphics card?

Ha, no but if said graphics card failed, not having on board video would really be annoying, as it would shut you down from your computer until you got a replacement.

Image quality wise DVI is exactly the same as HDMI. The only difference i know of is that HDMI carries audio as well. Anyways sorry Tom I will get back on topic now.

As Josh said though the onboard video would come into play if your GPU failed.

Just a thought, imagine how sexy this board would look with dual 690s *drool

The chances of your primary monitor and GPU both failing at the same time are pretty slim. Gigabyte (or anyone) should not be catering for scenarios like this if it means wasting I/O space with an archaic connection.

And even if your primary monitor and GPU BOTH failed at the SAME time, I'm sure you've got one of those DVI to VGA things you could use, I've got at least three of them around the place.

actually i have had this happen in the past, albeit part and parcel of a lightning strike, but nonetheless, the fact remains that BOTH my monitor AND GPU were trashed in an instant and i would have welcomed this feature back then so don't suggest "IT CAN'T HAPPEN" as it clearly can

I didn't say it can't happen, I said the chances are slim. And you're missing the point, completely.

oh so ugly for so much money

I actually agree that DVI/VGA don't need to be on the board, but I think they should include a PCIe card that serves as an adapter. I had to use the Intel HD 4000 to get through a week of waiting for my 4 7970s (shame the 7970GE came out already).

This should've been different with the WiFi module though, as a built-in module shouldn't have made the board so cramped.

Very value board in my opinion. 300 bucks for a board with so many features. It's essentially a thunderbolt port away from the P8Z77-V Premium from ASUS for 120 bucks less. Very fast board, good for HPC as far as I've used it, the 2 Gigabit LAN ports are great, temps are fine and overclocks great. Dual BIOS is cool but doesn't match ASUS's, power cosumption is terribly inefficient, and is sort of bloated for a board. Works well with my Gentoo Linux and Windows 7 and pretty much all of its software works on at least one of those OSes. Wish it had FireWire and eSATA in the back. Shame it was E-ATX, I was going to get it crammed into the CoolerMaster 430.

Board looks rather silly, and the color scheme is weird.

Hey TTL what temps were you seeing @ the 1.092v, 4.8GHz OC on air?

and thanks... love the youtube vids, and hard work you put in to educate noobs like me!!!

1.092v wasnt the vcore... And it wasnt me that wrote the review.

sorry for the mistake please