Gigabyte G1 Assassin and Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition Review – 5ghz

There is no doubting that the Gigabyte G1 Assassin is an expensive product. Priced at £450 in the United Kingdom it will certainly prove to be only for those people with deep pockets. On first impressions there is no doubting that something very special lies within the gargantuan box.

To be fair, the price of this board is actually more reasonable that it might first appear. For a start the build quality and component selection is possibly the finest we have seen in our labs to date, no corners have been cut, nothing is missing.

The inclusion of professional grade audio capacitors and multi channel amplifiers ensures that the Gigabyte G1 Assassin will appeal to the audience who are unhappy with ‘run of the mill' onboard solutions. Including the Killer E2100 as a dedicated network processor is an informed choice and really does enhance the overall networking speeds and latencies.

The design of the motherboard is almost without fault, the military theme is perfectly executed and attention to detail throughout is exceptional. The heatsink construction is inspired and certainly helps to keep the thermal dynamics well within safe parameters, even when overclocking a flagship 12 core processor to over 5ghz.

While this is our first experience with the Intel Core i7 990x Extreme Edition processor, our overclocking results are much better than those we achieved with the 980x. We have had two of these chips and both were limited to around 4.8ghz, even with high end watercooling. The 990x happily sits just past 5ghz with a mainstream liquid cooler from Antec. Some of the credit has to go to the excellent Gigabyte G1 Assassin bios configuration and 16 phase power circuitry to ensure the most stable, dynamic overclocks.

Today we tried to test the board to reflect real world conditions of the target gaming audience. With multiple high end AMD and Nvidia graphics cards running in CrossfireX x2/3 and Sli configurations. It would be safe to say that performance is certainly not lacking.

When everything is considered, a system configuration like this will be out of reach for most people, even most of the enthusiast audience who read KitGuru. If however you can afford the Gigabyte G1 Assassin and the new Intel Core i7 990x then we can only feel envious. This is without question the ‘ultimate' high end enthusiast system of choice.

KitGuru says: Expensive products, but the performance available is incredible. Well worth the money. Both products earn our highest award, if you have the disposable budget then this should be your next system.

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