The G1.Sniper M5 is the biggest of all
the motherboards we’re looking at in this test, and it still feels strange to
be saying that about a micro ATX board. But the times have changed and all the
performance you need from a top mobo can be found in the mini-ITX form factor,
so why would you consider the increasingly out-of-place halfway house of the
mATX?
The biggest reason is that at the
moment, for a mini gaming PC, it doesn’t actually matter that much which size
board you go for. That’s because there isn’t a chassis around at the moment
that can hold a mini-ITX board and discrete graphics card, and doesn’t look
like a slightly cut-down tower case. The EVGA Hadron Air and the Bitfenix
Prodigy are two of our favourite mini-ITX chassis, but they’re not even close
to the sort of dimensions Valve has put out for its inaugural hardware. Let’s
keep in mind that the prototype Steam Machine is meant to be just three inches
in height. That means the GPU needs to be lying flat next to the mini-ITX mobo,
and that’s just not happening right now.
The
G1.Sniper M5 is the biggest of all the motherboards we’re looking at in this
test, and it still feels strange to be saying that about a micro ATX board.
Extra, extra
Until the blueprint for that chassis
is out in the wild and manufacturers start building their own versions, you
might as well go for a mATX board in something like the Prodigy M. It’s still
the same dimensions as the standard Prodigy model, but is built to house an
mATX board as well as a mini-ITX form factor.
Micro ATX boards have more PCB real
estate, and can therefore incorporate more extras into their designs. That’s
exactly what Gigabyte has done from the outset with the Sniper. We’ve looked at
this board a number of times, and its versatility and performance mean it keeps
cropping up. It’s very competitive with the Asus RoG board in terms of general
performance, in both synthetic processor benchmarks and gaming tests too, and
is a good chunk cheaper, too.
Micro
ATX boards have more PCB real estate, and can therefore incorporate more extras
into their designs.
It also has a number of features that
really mark it out against all the other small form factor boards in these
pages. The biggest of these is the ability to use multiple graphics cards if
you choose. We’d still always recommend buying the fastest single GPU card you
can, but having the extra PCIe slots means you can add a second card later on
once prices have dropped for a cheap performance boost.
There’s also the audio side of the
Sniper to consider as well. Gigabyte has made a big thing about the swappable
op amps on this motherboard, allowing you to entirely change the feel of the
audio with a simple change of a component. This is something normally only
found on high-end studio equipment, so it’s impressive to find it in what is
ostensibly a gaming-orientated board.
Seeing
as mini-ITX boards are now as powerful as their bigger siblings, it seems like
the mATX boards’ days are numbered at best.
In the end though, when we’re talking
about building mini gaming PCs we want to go as small as physically possible.
Seeing as mini-ITX boards are now as powerful as their bigger siblings, it
seems like the mATX boards’ days are numbered at best. The Sniper is a
well-specced performance motherboard, but even the dubious benefits of
multi-GPU upgrades and high fidelity audio can’t really push it that far ahead
of the teeny, weeny competition on the market.
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Vital Statistics
·
Price: $246.4 ·
Manufacturer:
Gigabyte ·
Chipset: Intel
Z87 ·
Socket: LGA 1150 ·
Memory: Up to
32GB @ 3,000MHz ·
Memory slots:
slots 4x DDR3 DIMM ·
Storage: 6x SATA
6Gbps ·
Ports: 4x USB
3.0, 2x USB 2.0, 2x HDMI, DVI
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