ASRock X79 Extreme4 X79 Motherboard Review

3DMark 11

3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online.

When looking at 3DMark 11, we can see that the overclock helped the score when looking at the Performance preset, though the Extreme preset saw no real benefit from increasing the speed of the processor as 3DMark 11 relies more of GPU performance than CPU, but it’s good to know we’re not being bottlenecked.

Unigine Heaven 2.5

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies and utilises the full effect of DirectX 11 and allows you to configure shaders, tessellation and quality settings to your own personal choice.

Heaven saw no benefit between the different clock speeds, but still gave an overall good score based off the default settings used.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market.

The 3960X/ASRock X79 based system gave some promising results from Metro 2033, though the overclock only gave a marginal increase, that’s actually quite good in such an intensive game, like Metro.