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Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £80
inc VAT

A decent FM2+ ATX board with good performance, but you can get pretty much all of the same features on cheaper boards

Specifications

FM2+, ATX, A88X chipset, supports: AMD A-Series, Athlon

http://www.cclonline.com

The Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X is an ATX FM2+ motherboard that’s been designed with gaming in mind. With an the A88X chipset, it supports AMD’s brand new Kaveri processors, as well as older FM2 models.

Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X

There’s plenty of space to build here, so it’s easy to get started. With four DDR3 memory slots available, the G1 Sniper A88X is able to support up to 64GB of RAM at a maximum speed of 2,400MHz when overclocked. This will be plenty for most users, but it’s nice to have the headroom for future upgrades.

As it’s a full-size ATX board, there’s a good number of expansion slots. There are two PCI-E x16 slots, but bear in mind that only one runs at the full bandwidth at the faster PCI Express 3.0 standard. The other runs at x4 and uses the 2.0 standard. This is only likely to be a slight bottleneck for someone wanting to install two high-end graphics cards.

Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X

Not that you have to install a dedicated graphics card, as you can use an FM2+ CPU’s onboard graphics. If you do, you can use the DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs simultaneously, with the HDMI output supporting up to 4K resolutions.

The board also has three PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots for other expansion cards. Your hard drives and SSDs won’t have to compromise on performance, as the G1 Sniper comes with eight SATA3 ports. That’s enough for more storage than most people will ever need.

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Basic Specifications

Rating***
Processor socketFM2+
Form factorATX
Size220x305mm
Processor supportAMD A-Series, Athlon
Processor external bus100MHz
Chipset north bridgeA88X
Chipset south bridgeA88X
Passively-cooled north bridgeyes
Integrated graphicsNo
Supported memory typeDDR3
Maximum memory speedPC3-19200
Memory slots4
Maximum memory64GB
Dual-channel supportyes

Buying Information

Price£80
Supplierhttp://www.cclonline.com
Detailswww.giga-byte.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots2
Dual graphics architectureCrossFire, AMD Dual Graphics
PCI-E x4 slots0
PCI-E x1 slots3
PCI slots2
Fan headers4
Floppy ports0
IDE ports0
Serial ATA ports0
RAID chipset (max disks)AMD A88X (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD)

Features

Wired network ports1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports)Realtek ALC898 (5x analogue, optical S/PDIF out)
USB2 ports / headers7/6
Firewire ports / headers0
Legacy portsserial header
Other portsVGA, DVI, HDMI
Cables included4x SATA
Brackets includednone
Software includednone

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustmentCPU/RAM/Chipset
CPU clock max adjustment140MHz

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