Gigabyte Announces G1.Sniper B6 Socket LGA1150 Motherboard

Gigabyte announced a new G1.Gaming series socket LGA1150 motherboard for gamers who don't plan on overclocking their CPUs, the G1.Sniper B6. Retaining the classic black+green color scheme, which should go well with reference-design GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards, the G1.Sniper B6 is based on Intel B85 Express chipset, and comes with out of the box support for Core "Haswell" and "Devil's Canyon" CPUs. On the flip-side, while the board features two long PCI-Express x16 slots, only one of the two is gen 3.0 x16, and wired to the CPU. The other is electrical gen 2.0 x4, wired to the PCH, instead. The board hence lacks NVIDIA SLI support.

Drawing power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS connectors, the board features an 8-phase CPU VRM. Other expansion slots include two each of PCI-Express 2.0 x1 and legacy PCI. Storage connectivity includes an M.2 10 Gb/s slot, and four SATA 6 Gb/s and two SATA 3 Gb/s ports. Gamer-grade features include AMP UP onboard audio featuring an EMI-shielded 115 dBA SNR CODEC, ground-layer isolation, audio-grade electrolytic capacitors, and a user-replaceable headphones amp; and Intel gigabit Ethernet. Expect this board to be priced under $120.