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.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The G1.Assassin2 is a $400 motherboard which is a lot of money to spend. The fact that you can expect to plunk down about $1000 on the CPU you need to get this running makes it appear to be an even more expensive proposition. However, if you look at the average cost of an X79 motherboard and then add in the cost of an X-Fi audio card and a KillerNIC card you will find that the cost is not that far off from the rest of the market. Conclusion -The Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 is a solid product. It combines some excellent items that normally a gamer or enthusiast would need to purchase separately into one package and does this without compromising day to day performance or stability. We are not terribly happy that you are limited to only four RAM slots, but in the end that simple design choice will earn you about 500MB/s in memory bandwidth which offsets the lack of expansion room. As a general usage platform the G1.Assassin2 does very well, we had no issues running productivity applications, web browsing, watching DVD movies (these were actually better due to the much better audio) etc. For Workstation performance the G1.Assassin2 seemed to slip a little. It was not as fast as the Intel X79SI, but it is also not being marketed to that crowd. The G1.Assassin2’s strongest showing was in gaming. I am not talking about frames per second, but the whole gaming experience. The built-in X-fi sound card was really able to flesh out the games we use for testing. Gigabyte’s G1.Assassin2 is a worthy successor to the original G1.Assassin; if you are looking to build a gaming rig centered around one of the new Sandy Bridge E CPUs then you will want to pick one of these up.Discuss this review on our Forum
