TechRadar Verdict
A pumped up grunt of a board - power mad, unjustifiable and a waste of fiscal resources.
Pros
- +
High performance
- +
'Specialist' visual appeal
Cons
- -
Hugely overpriced
- -
No incentive to ignore Sandy Bridge
Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The market for top-of-the-line X58 boards should have dried up with the release of the Sandy Bridge chips, but the Gigabyte G1.Assassin X58 board is looking to get people excited again.
The latest Intel Sandy Bridge chips have dominated CPU-related column inches, for better or for worse, since their release early last month.
That said, it's still the Gulftown chips and accompanying X58 chipsets that sit atop the entire Intel range though, for now at least.
The Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition is theoretically Intel's fastest production chip, and that leaves enthusiasts in a quandary.
Stick with the X58 platform and buy the best right now, or wait for the Sandy bridge SATA issues to be resolved and invest in formidable new technology with an eye on a Sandy Bridge hexcore?
I certainly know how Gigabyte would answer that question. 'Live in the now, man! What's money anyway? You can't take it with you!' That's what they'd tell us, in a voice almost as loud as the X58-based G1.Assassin's visual stylings.
Priced at over £400, this is very much an enthusiast's mobo solution. In amongst the cooling bits modeled on ammo clips, the Gigabyte G1.Assassin sports two PCI-E x16 and two x8 slots, so sexy crossfire GPU foursomes are on the menu.
There's also triple channel DDR3 memory supporting up to 24GB at up to 2000MHz. It's USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps friendly, as you'd expect for the price.
You'd also expect a bit more, wouldn't you?
