With AMD fizzling out in the high end desktop market segment, people are increasingly choosing the Intel LGA 1150 platform for high end gaming systems. Not surprisingly motherboard vendors have responded to the popularity of LGA 1150, in particular Z87, and we are seeing a highly competitive market. Gigabyte, ASUS, MSI and ASRock are all constantly trying to undercut each other buy offering better quality motherboards at lower prices. Gigabyte’s latest attempt to pull away from the competition is the new G1 Sniper Z87 motherboard costing just $170/£115. Considering past G1 Sniper motherboards, like the G1 Sniper 5 Z87 and G1 Sniper M5 Z87, cost $400 and $200 respectively Gigabyte have really made some significant cost savings with the G1 Sniper Z87 motherboard. Yet looking at the G1 Sniper Z87 it is hard to see where those savings have been made because we still have a whole array of high end options including dual PCIe 3.0 X16 lanes, six SATA III ports, an 8 phase CPU VRM, high quality audio, Killer E2200 networking and a dual UEFI BIOS. The G1 Sniper Z87 looks like an option that will be hard to match at its price point.



Link: eTeknix