Gigabyte G1.Assassin Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel X58 chipset is a dual-chip solution, using the ICH10R south bridge chip. This chip supports six SATA-300 ports (with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10). The G1.Assassin has two SATA-600 ports, controlled by one Marvell 88SE9128, supporting RAID (0 and 1). In Figure 4 you can see these ports, located on the motherboard edge, rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. SATA-600 ports are the white ones, and the black ports are the native SATA-300 ports.

Figure 4: SATA-300 and SATA-600 ports

There is no native eSATA port, but you can convert one SATA-300 port into an eSATA port using the front panel shown in Figure 5.

There are no ATA-133 or floppy disk drive ports.

This motherboard has eight USB 2.0 ports, four soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It has also eight USB 3.0 ports, controlled by one Renesas D720200 chip (which provides two ports) and two Via Labs VL810 hubs (which can multiply one USB 3.0 port to four). Four of these ports are soldered on the rear panel, and another four are available on two front panel headers. This motherboard comes with an adapter for you to install two of these ports on an external 5.25” bay, shown in Figure 5. This front panel also provides one shared eSATA/USB 2.0 port, besides the overclock button that allows you to change the overclock configuration by hardware.

Every USB port on this board has an individual fuse to protect the system from short-circuits.

Figure 5: Front panel

There are no FireWire (IEEE1394) ports.

One of the highlights of the G1.Assassin is the onboard audio, generated by a Creative CA20K2 SoundBlaster Digital Audio Processor. This is a high-end sound board, supporting 7.1 Advanced HD 5.0 audio. The analog audio has high capacity amplifiers, and the audio circuits use h
igh quality capacitors from the Japanese Nichicon manufacturer.

The motherboard comes with on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors, and you can route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_O” header.

The analog audio jacks are independent, meaning that you won’t need to “kill” the mic in or the line in jacks if you install an analog 7.1 speaker set.

The onboard Ethernet is a Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100, which is a full network processor with 128 MB dedicated RAM that takes all the networking tasks from the CPU and the operating systems. You can learn more about this feature in our review of an Ethernet card based on this chip, the EVGA Killer Xeno Pro.

Figure 6: Killer 2100 processor and memory

In Figure 7, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors, optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports (blue), one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 7: Motherboard rear panel

In Figure 8, you can see all the accessories that come with this motherboard: cables, manuals, drivers DVD, case backplate, SLI and CrossFireX bridges, and some questionable taste poster and stickers for your case and your room.

Figure 8: Accessories