Gaming Performance
Gamers who care about every ounce of performance will be pleased to see that the G1.Sniper2's lead carried into our gaming benchmarks. The board fetched an extra 2fps over the Extreme4 when running Battlefield Bad Company 2 at 1920x1200 with the Gigabyte GeForce GTX SOC graphics card.
Although few G1.Sniper2 owners would game at 1280x800, by running the game at such a low resolution it helps remove GPU and CPU limitations. In such a scenario, the G1.Sniper2 actually extended its lead over the Z68 Extreme4 to 5fps on average, with 2fps edge at minimum. Moreover, it was 12fps faster than the original G1.Sniper and 22fps quicker than the Asus Crosshair IV.
The Z68 G1.Sniper2 was considerably faster than the X58 G1.Sniper when testing Far Cry 2 at 1920x1200, but it was only a frame ahead of the Extreme4 on average. Unfortunately, despite running the title at a relatively high resolution, AMD's CPUs create a bottleneck well before the GPU.
Even when running Far Cry 2 at 1280x800, very little separates the G1.Sniper2 and Extreme4, while both are much faster than the X58 and 890FX solutions we've tested.
For reasons unknown to us, Dirt 3 favors the older Core i7 processors over the second-gen Sandy Bridge models. This is evident when testing the G1.Sniper2 which was slower than the original G1.Sniper at 1920x1200.
We find similar results at 1280x800 as the original Gigabyte G1.Sniper was faster than the new G1.Sniper2. The G1.Sniper2 did however manage to keep pace with the Extreme4.