We have now had the G1.Assassin2 up on the test bench for a little over a week now and are ready to talk about our experience with it. The G1.Assassin2 is Gigabyte’s current top of the line x79 motherboard and follows in the same trend as the other boards in the G1 line up. This means that you get the military theme, the built in audio card, and of course the KillerNIC E2100 NPU. However, there are also things that had us concerned about how the G1.Assassin2 might handle certain types of work. So let’s get started and see if all of the new features (like the 3D BIOS and 3D Power) work and if the concerns that we talked about in the design and feature review are valid or not.
The Test System and Comments -Our test system is built on an open bench. This has two effects on testing. First it allows us to see everything and also to setup and disassemble the test rigs quickly. Second it means that we cannot gauge the potential air flow found in a normal case. The air is pretty stagnant; some may say this is a great neutral testing method and it can be. However, it does mean that the temperature reading taken off of the components are not accurate to what an average consumer would see. This means that your thermal performance will vary from what we see here. The G1.Assassin2 was (as you might expect) very simple to get setup. All we did was mount everything on the board, install Windows, install the drivers and utilities using the option on the DVD to do this and then run about four hours-worth of updates for Windows… but really there was not much more to it than that. One nice thing about the G1.Assassin2 over the original assassin is that it is normal ATX sized. You do not have to worry about having a massive case to use this one with and you still have options for Tri-SLI. In terms of general usage we found the G1.Assassin2 to be quick and easy to work with. We did not find anything that stood out as a possible issue, everything just seemed to work. Performance testing overview -Our testing is a little different than most. We combine both synthetic and real-world applications to simulate the types of performance common to the individual products. For motherboards this means that we run roughly six synthetic tests and two real-world. We will be expanding the real-world testing in the near future. But there is more to performance than just the raw numbers. As there are multiple components and sub-components on a motherboard there each item can have a distinct impact on the way the product will perform once you get it in your system. It is important to note not only the actual results but what they mean to you as a potential consumer. We will try to give this information to you. But we do not just cover the performance aspects that are measurable. We also talk about the components that might not have a direct benchmark. These are items like Audio Quality, ease of use and installation.
