Gigabyte's G1.Assassin 2 LGA 2011 Motherboard Becomes Official

After catching a glimpse of the X79 G1.Assassin 2 in a series of teaser pictures published back in October, now we can feast our eyes on the final version of the motherboard as Gigabyte has finally made it official.

The board hasn't suffered any chances since these initial pictures released almost a month ago, so it still sports the same aggressive look characteristic of the the company's G1-Killer solutions.

Its most distinctive feature is the PCH heatsink that is shaped to look like a gun with a skull logo engraved on it.

While this won't certainly be everyone's cup of tea, the radiator actually fits pretty nice with the overall design of the G1.Assassin 2 and should also will most definitely comes as an attractive feature for the board's target audience.

Moving past its look, the G1.Assassin 2 is designed around the X79 chipset which is seconded by two Marvell 88SE9172 controllers for adding four more SATA 6Gbps ports to the ones provided by the Intel PCH.

However, only two of these were installed on the motherboard's PCB, while the other two are routed to the back I/O panel as eSATA 6Gbps ports.

The rest of the specifications include three PCI Express x16 slots with 3-way CrossFireX and SLI support and a high-power 8-phase VRM with POScaps and Driver MOSFETs.

For those add-on cards that don't require all the bandwidth provided by an x16 slot, Gigabyte has also installed two PCIe x1 and a legacy 32-bit PCI slot.

Like all the motherboards in the G1-Killer range, the Assassin 2 comes equipped with an integrated Creative X-Fi PCI Express sound card featuring Nichicon MUSE audio capacitors and a Killer E2100 NIC with 1GB of dedicated DDR2 memory.

Sadly, Gigabyte hasn't provided any details regarding the price of the G1.Assassin 2, but all the extra gaming features are expected to add quite a bit to the motherboard's MSRP.

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