Review: GIGABYTE's latest iteration of the massively specced and featured Killer range is taking aim at Intel's Z68 chipset...
The second generation of GIGABYTE's well received G1-Killer rage has arrived on the scene, but you wouldn't pick it judging by visuals alone. Green and black are still in, married with the same iconic ammunition magazine heatsink, and a familiar board layout. In fact, the main visual difference is an added MOSFET heatsink to the side of the CPU socket.
As you may recall, there were three board variations in the Killer range, namely the Guerrilla, Sniper and Assassin boards, in order of expense and features. The original series thrust itself directly into the aging (but solid) X58 platform, which has the advantage of greater PCI-e and memory bandwidth. The new series so far consists only of the G1.Sniper 2, the midrange of the three previous offerings, and sports Intel's latest Z68 Express chipset.
PCI-e 1, 2, now 3! If you thought saturating PCI-e 2.0 was a challenge, get ready for another generation of everyone's favorite peripheral bus. Existing motherboards use PCI-e 2.0 to communicate data from the various expansion cards to the CPU for processing. This bus transfers data at 500 MB/s per lane (that's a 16GB/s transfer for a full sized 16x slot, in both directions), with a base clock of 5GHz, and a transfer rate of 5GT/s.
PCI-e 3.0 effectively doubles the bandwidth of PCI-e 2.0 to approximately 1GB/s per lane, with a transfer rate of 8GT/s. You may be wondering why the transfer rate didn't double to 10GT/s, the answer lies in the encoding of the bus, which has been changed from the 8b/10b to 128b/130b encoding scheme. The result is a large reduction in performance overhead, from 20% down to 1.5%.
The beauty of the PCI-e 3.0 specification is that PCI-e 3.0 cards can function in older PCI-e slots, and older cards will function in the new slots. However, there's one small caveat, you'll need an Ivy Bridge processor to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. The reason for this is the recent (since Lynnfield) reallocation of the PCI-e controller from the motherboard to the CPU die.
There's two PCI-e 16x slots on this board, so only 2-way SLI or Crossfire setups can be used on this board, where each card is allocated 8 PCI-e 3.0 lanes.
A shot to the head for X58, P67 It's become a no brainer for technicians to opt for the Z68 platform over the reigning champions P67 and X58. Z68 is a direct upgrade of the existing features of P67, so there's little point pushing P67 anymore. As for X58, the raw performance of Sandy Bridge microprocessors over Nehalem says it all. 5GHz is an easy feat on our 2600K, and quite a challenge on the i9xx range of Nehalem based processors. Add the fact that this motherboard has BIOS support for Ivy Bridge - the 22nm successor to Sandy Bridge - and we can only imagine the overclock gap between X58 and Z68 widening further still. So long, X58!
Issue: 137 | June, 2012