ECS Elitegroup Z77H2-AX Golden Board (Z77) 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.

Taking a look at 3DMark 11 and more gaming orientated tests, we can see the ECS board giving solid performance at both performance and extreme levels with only the Maximus V Gene board slightly ahead. When overclocked, the results shot well past what we’ve seen before, by over 400 points on the performance preset, and over 200 points on extreme. It’s as if our graphics performance was injected with steroids.

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.

Metro was exactly the same, with a clear 3-4FPS difference at stock, compared to the other boards and the overclocking raising things even further with a clear 3-6FPS across multiple resolutions.