G1.Sniper 5 has Best Audio SNR out of 33 8 Series Motherboards Tested

 

 

Not sure if this was posted earlier or not, but Hardware.info at the beginning of this month posted their review of over 33 different 8 series motherboards: “33 Haswell motherboard group test: 26x Z87, 4x H87 and 3x B8”. Besides the fact that not one, but two GIGABYTE motherboards ended up getting the gold award (the Z87X-OC and G1.Sniper 5), I noticed something very interesting in the audio testing section. Out of all the boards tested, the Sniper 5 had the best dB(A) rating of 96.4. The next closest board came in at 92.3dB(A).

We use the loopback test in Rightmark Audio Analyzer, and connect the input to the output of the onboard soundcard. First we look at the signal-to-noise ratio, and Gigabyte convincingly takes the crown with its G1.Sniper 5 motherboard and the Creative Sound Core3D chip. It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

It’s nice to see the audio features we put on our gaming boards really do deliver the best onboard audio experience. As they didn’t test the G1.Sniper M5 it would be interesting to see how that board would fair in terms of audio since it shares the same audio features as it’s big brother. I can’t really blame them though, since testing 33 motherboards for launch time must have been crazy.