GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 Motherboard Review

Print
by Rob Williams on December 2, 2013 in Motherboards

Gamers with deep pockets who appreciate motherboards packed to the gills with features, features, and more features ought to have a look at GIGABYTE’s G1.Sniper 5. Its black and green aesthetics are eye-catching, sure, but its feature-set would surely make its rivals green with envy. Read on to find out what we think of the G1.Sniper 5!

Page 5 – Performance Testing

From a performance perspective, we feel that motherboard benchmarking is useless. It’s the motherboard’s job to allow all of the installed hardware to operate at its full potential, so in theory, a $100 option shouldn’t be much (or any) slower than a $300 one. The differences in price instead comes down to the quality of the onboard components and other features.

So why do it at all? It’s because it’s important to make sure that the board we’re dealing with doesn’t lack in one particular area versus the rest. If board A performs 2% slower than board B in PCMark, for example, that’s of no concern to us – random benchmark variance is a fact of life. However, if one board consistently performs weaker than the rest, that’s worthy of note – it could suggest that weaker components have been used which do not allow the hardware to operate at its full potential.

Please bear this in mind when perusing our results. Just because a board under-performs in a single test, it doesn’t mean anything in regards to its quality as a whole. Our ultimate goal here is to make sure that each board we test performs as we’d expect across the gamut of scenarios we pit them against.

Because some motherboards auto-OC the CPU when certain options are chosen (XMP, for example), we force the Turbo ratios for our Core i7-4770K to reference settings: 39x/39x/38x/37x (1/2/3/4 cores).

  Intel LGA1150 Test System
Processor Intel Core i7-4770K – Quad-Core, 3.50GHz
Motherboard ASUS Z87-EXPERT (BIOS: ’1206′ 07/19/2013)
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 (BIOS: ‘F7′ 08/05/2013)
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H (BIOS: ‘F7′ 08/05/2013)
Memory Kingston HyperX Beast 2x8GB – DDR3-2133 11-12-11-31 @ 1.65v
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti (GeForce 326.41 Driver)
Audio Onboard
Storage Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
Power Supply Corsair HX850W
Chassis Corsair Obsidian 700D Full-Tower
Cooling Noctua NH-U14S Air Cooler
Et cetera Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Let’s get on with it!

BCLK Values Result
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 100.0 MHz
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 100.0 MHz
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 100.0 MHz

The BCLK matchup is as perfectly even as it could get.

General System Performance

To take a look at the “overall” performance of our PC configuration, we rely on dual Futuremark suites: PCMark 8 and 3DMark (2013).

PCMark 8 Suite Scores Home Work Creative
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 5525 5386 4333
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 5605 5423 4480
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 5389 5403 4341
Higher results are better.
3DMark (2013) Fire Storm Cloud Gate Ice Storm
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 4723 19834 139827
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 4700 20083 143964
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 4391 19747 137622
3DMark results in points; higher is better.

Things are looking good, so far.

I/O Performance

To properly give the internal SATA 6Gbps a good workout, we turn to HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark.

HD Tune Pro 5 Minimum Average Maximum Latency
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 308.5 465.2 438.1 0.038ms
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 299.3 407.6 437.2 0.059ms
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 183.5 363.3 294.7 0.070ms
Min/Avg/Max results in MB/s; higher is better. Latency results in ms; lower is better.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Read Seq. Read 4K Write Seq. Write 4K
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 514.3 41.83 317.5 160.2
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 501.0 38.44 311.0 126.5
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 506.8 30.92 314.2 58.66
All results in MB/s.

As we discovered in our look at GIGABYTE’s UD3H board, its I/O performance was quite lacking – for what reason, we’re not sure. There’s no such issue with the G1.Sniper 5, however.

Rendering & Image Manipulation

Writing files to disk or reading a website doesn’t do much to exercise our CPU, so for that, we turn to a few common scenarios – image editing, video rendering and 3D rendering – using a combination of Adobe, CyberLink and Autodesk products.

Adobe Lightroom 5.0 Result
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 255 s
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 244 s
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 255 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.
CyberLink MediaEspresso Result
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 3754 s
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 3644 s
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 3656 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.
Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 Result
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 1082 s
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 1108 s
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 1077 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.
Cinebench R11.5 OpenGL CPU
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 80.03 8.14
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 80.47 8.14
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 82.08 8.16
Higher results are better.

The G1 board continues churning out good results.

Sub-system Performance

For memory and CPU testing, we utilize SiSoftware’s Sandra 2013 (SP3a), and for Ethernet testing, we use iperf (or more appropriately, the Java-based jperf which utilizes it).

Sandra 2013 SP3a Integer Float Mem Latency
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 27.447 GB/s 27.660 GB/s 22.2 ns
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 27.441 GB/s 27.567 GB/s 21.9 ns
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 27.491 GB/s 27.556 GB/s 22.0 ns
Int/Float/Cache results in GB/s; higher is better. Latency results in ns; lower is better.
Sandra 2013 SP3a Arithmetic (Agg.) Multi-media (Agg.)
ASUS Z87-EXPERT 111 GOPS 400 MPix/s
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 112 GOPS 400 MPix/s
GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H 112 GOPS 400 MPix/s
Higher is better.
Ethernet (iperf) 50 Jobs (64KB) 50 Jobs (1518KB)
ASUS Z87-EXPERT (Intel I217V) 938 942
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 (Intel I217V) 936 937
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 (Intel I217V) 936 941
Results in Mbps; higher is better.

All checks out here – time to move onto our final thoughts.

Support our efforts! With ad revenue at an all-time low for written websites, we're relying more than ever on reader support to help us continue putting so much effort into this type of content. You can support us by becoming a Patron, or by using our Amazon shopping affiliate links listed through our articles. Thanks for your support!

Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

twitter icon facebook icon instagram icon