Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X review

The Gigabyte G1 Sniper A88X is an ATX FM2+ motherboard that’s been designed with gaming in mind. With an the A88X chipset, it supports AMD’s brand new Kaveri processors, as well as older FM2 models.

There’s plenty of space to build here, so it’s easy to get started. With four DDR3 memory slots available, the G1 Sniper A88X is able to support up to 64GB of RAM at a maximum speed of 2,400MHz when overclocked. This will be plenty for most users, but it’s nice to have the headroom for future upgrades.

As it’s a full-size ATX board, there’s a good number of expansion slots. There are two PCI-E x16 slots, but bear in mind that only one runs at the full bandwidth at the faster PCI Express 3.0 standard. The other runs at x4 and uses the 2.0 standard. This is only likely to be a slight bottleneck for someone wanting to install two high-end graphics cards.

Not that you have to install a dedicated graphics card, as you can use an FM2+ CPU’s onboard graphics. If you do, you can use the DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs simultaneously, with the HDMI output supporting up to 4K resolutions.

The board also has three PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots for other expansion cards. Your hard drives and SSDs won’t have to compromise on performance, as the G1 Sniper comes with eight SATA3 ports. That’s enough for more storage than most people will ever need.

On the rear panel, the G1 Sniper has plenty of ports and Gigabyte has placed a special emphasis on improving its sound support. On top of its optical S/PDIF optical output and five 3.5mm audio jacks for 7.1 surround sound, there’s also a gold-plated USB2 port that’s been especially designed to connect to a DAC, cutting down on noise to deliver enhanced audio. Well, that’s if you believe that the connector on a purely digital interconnect can make any difference to sound quality. There’s also a PS/2 port and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

We were disappointed that there were only two USB3 ports to be found with its five USB2 ports, but there’s a USB3 header on the front of the board for an additional two USB3 ports if your case layout allows for it.

We tested the G1 Sniper A88X with an AMD A10-7850K processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1,600MHz and it scored 71 overall. This is roughly what we’d expect to see from this setup,

At £80, the G1 Sniper A88X is a good price for a mid-range board, but you’re not getting much more for your money than the cheaper Asus A88XM-PLUS. Unless you specifically need the extra space an ATX motherboard gives you, go for the A88XM-Plus instead.