Gigabyte G1.Sniper.2 Z68 Motherboard Review

We put this board through all of our benchmarks to stress it as much as we possibly could. This includes full testing of Intel’s Smart Response technology, as well as overall stability and performance. This board was able to produce really good scores and some of the best we’ve seen for the Z68 chipset.

One thing to keep in mind is that this board retails for about 360 dollars. For this price we were expecting slightly better performance. Don’t get me wrong, it did outperform all of the other Z68 boards that we’ve tested, just not by as much as we were expecting. There were even some scores that this board placed second in. These benchmark scores were very close though. I would have to say that this board just doesn’t quite live up to its G1 pedigree.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, the performance scores for this board were actually very good. It competed on par with the ASRock Extreme7 Gen3 board, which is actually the top performing Z68 board that we’ve tested so far. You have to keep in mind that the G1 board also comes with some really nice enthusiast geared features. These include the onboard Bigfoot E2100 Network chip for improved LAN capabilities. It also features an onboard Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Digital Audio chip. These are features that will definitely add cost to the board, but won’t necessarily improve benchmark performance.