Gigabyte teased us with pictures of its high-end socket LGA2011 motherboard featured in its G1.Killer series of motherboards designed for the gamer-overclocker market. The G1.Assassin 2, as it's called, is based on the Intel X79 chipset. We don't have landscape pictures of the board, yet, but whatever little bits of pictures we do have, reveal quite a bit. To begin with, this board will retain the black+green "weapon" styling of predecessors in the series. The LGA2011 socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, in sets of two, on either sides of the socket. Each DIMM slot has its own memory channel.

From the CPU VRM heatsink, a heat pipe is finding its way to a stylized X79 PCH heatsink. This heatsink is designed to look like a handgun. Since it's so small, it isn't looking as realistic as the clip design featured on other G1.Killer motherboards. There are just six internal SATA ports we can find from the picture, two 6 Gb/s, and four 3 Gb/s. In terms of expansion slots, we could spot three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, these could be arranged in the x16/x16/NC or x16/x8/x8 lane configuration.Connectivity is where G1.Killer edges past competition. There are two hardware onboard devices that are a $200 value if purchased as discrete addon cards: there's Bigfoot Networks' Killer E2100 network processor, and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi. Both devices use hardware-accelerated controllers. The Killer E2100 works to lower network latencies (good for online gaming), while the Creative CA20K1 provides awesome audio. It has a high-grade OPAMP circuit that makes use of audiophile-grade electrolytic capacitors (costlier than conductive polymer). We'll need more pictures to comment on the other features.