Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X Review
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It’s worth remembering through this that the G1 Sniper A88X only costs a mere £80. Perhaps that’s down to marketing and the target market of customers, but it does come with a lot of features that we’d never normally expect to see on a board of this price.
The board itself has a matte black PCB which does look great. To an extent, it does actually draw attention more to the green accents on the board which we do think look good.
The board comes with 4 DIMM slots, with a rated compatibility of up to 2400MHz. The area around the processor is actually a little empty for a high end motherboard. We would normally expect to see more capacitors and other components, as well as a larger heatsink(s). We hope this doesn’t effect the overclocking performance too heavily, but it is worth noting the marginally more expensive MSI A88X-G45 Gaming does have more in the area VRM and MOSFET support.
Gigabyte have gone to the extent of putting a high quality audio solution on this board, and for a motherboard of this price, that is really great to see. It has an onboard headphone amplifier which is upgradable, but on its own it is capable of driving relatively high impedance headphones. This is operated by two hardware switches. We tested this with 250Ohm headphones and the amplifier was easily powerful enough to drive them. It is worth keeping in mind here that very few soundcards come with a headphone amp capable of doing this, and the ones that do are nearly all more expensive alone than this motherboard. If you’re incredibly picky over how your music sounds, then you probably would want to look at a more advanced alternative, but this does offer a great option for users wanting good quality audio through proper studio headphones whilst on a budget.
The audio has been isolated as well as possible for a motherboard, and the tracing lines do light up green which does look great when installed in a system.
The motherboard comes with two PCIE x16 ports. The top slot is PCIE 3.0, whilst the other is 2.0. It is worth noting that the top slot will only run at PCIE 3.0 bandwidth with a Kaveri APU installed. The lower slot however is only wired at x4 and so if you are wanting to run multiple graphics cards then you may be slightly limited in performance.
The range of SATA ports is great. The G1 Sniper A88X comes equipped with 8 SATA 3 ports, two of which are angled at 90 degrees to the motherboard, whilst the other 6 point straight up. This is a bit of a shame since cables pointing up are unsightly. However, most people using this board will only run one or two hard drives, in which case this won’t be a problem.
Finally, on the I/O ports, we see the standard array of ports that we’d expect. Four USB 2.0 ports, 2xUSB 3.0, a VGA, DVI and HDMI, along with Gigabit Ethernet and 8 channel gold plated audio ports. It does also come with a fifth USB2.0 port which has been designed again with audio enthusiasts in mind. External DACs and headphone amplifiers have become quite popular over the past year or so, and getting clean power to these devices is important for audio quality. The gold plated USB port on the Sniper offers clean ‘DAC-UP power’ which means you’ll get less static noise through the circuits of your external DAC, and better audio quality overall.
We are definitely impressed with the amount of features this motherboard offers. To add to this, unlike a lot of motherboards we’ve seen in the past, the features the Sniper offers are features even the average consumer will benefit from. In the past we have seen motherboards advertise LN2 modes, and various other niche features that the majority of average consumers will never use. For £80 you really do get a lot for your money.
