Gigabyte Z68 G1.Sniper 2 Review

Item: Gigabyte Z68 G1.Sniper 2
Author: Bryan Waters

Test Setup and Overclocking

Published: 17th August 2011 | Source: Gigabyte | Price: £320 | Author: Bryan Waters

Test Setup

Today we're using our standard LGA1155 test rig. The only changes are the latest WHQL nVidia drivers and we're running all of our tests with IRST set in enhanced mode.

Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2 Z68 Motherboard
Intel Core-i5 2500K
4GB Kingston Genesis 2133MHz
EVGA GTX570 with ForceWare 280.26 WHQL
Samsung Spinpoint F1
Corsair 80GB SSD as Intel Rapid Storage Technology cache
Thermalright Silver Arrow
Windows 7 x64

Overclocking

The Sniper 2 is a very easy overclocker. As usual with Gigabyte boards it's a standard BIOS we've all seen a million times with the EFI element solely contained in a Windows program. We could get our Core i5-2500K to run at 4.9 GHz for most of our testing but it consistently bombed during PC Mark 7 so we backed it off slightly and these are the settings that we're using throughout our benchmarks today.

Gigabyte Z68 G1.Sniper 2 Overclocking

Speaking of benchmarks...

Most Recent Comments

17-08-2011, 08:05:28

dugdiamond

ouch - expensive!!! £250-£270 and i would have been impressed

Quote

17-08-2011, 08:29:09

SieB

I really hope that the price of this board will come down and that it is priced so high because it is being marketed as being PCI-E 3 and Ivy Bridge native and that retailers are just charging extra to cash in on it.

The thing is now that we know that all Gigabyte boards are PCI-E 3 compatible with just a simple BIOS update, then that makes the UD7 the better and cheaper board. Ok, so it may not have the sound card and the NIC chip but these have been proven to be not that much of a improvement over standard ones at a lower price anyway, so is it really worth paying the extra for them? No, in my opinion anyway.

It is a good board and it does look good and perform very well but the price is just to high