If you're a gamer or power user looking for a high-end motherboard with sharp looks, a boat-load of features and good overclocking potential, you don't have a great many options. In fact, there isn't that much choice outside of ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) series.
However, it looks like Gigabyte is set to launch its own line of super high-end motherboards at CES. The "unofficial" Gigabyte blog has posted a teaser poster for an all new board under the headline "Get Ready for a Showdown at CES". The picture shows a blacked out motherboard under the moniker 'G1-Killer' and teases that it will be 'coming soon'.
There aren't a lot of details that we can glean from the poster, but there are a couple of things that we can work out. Firstly, the $300 (£234) price-tag means that this is definitely a premium board that will be going up against the best from the likes of ASUS and EVGA. The inclusion of an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition sticker also implies that the board will use the X58 chipset and support LGA1366 CPUs.
However, you can just make out the silhouette of four memory slots, meaning that there might also be a P55 or P67 variant as well - or instead. Given the timing of the release and the fact that the poster says 'Gaming Motherboards' (plural) it's more than possible that Gigabyte will be launching a whole series of different boards, and we'd be very surprised if none of them supported Sandy Bridge CPUs. In fact, it's not even clear whether G1-Killer is the name of a specific product or the branding for a whole series.
Obviously this isn't as official as an official announcement, but we can be fairly certain that, come January, ASUS' ROG motherboards will have a little more competition at the top.
