Gigabyte Z77M-D3H Motherboard Sandy Bridge 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.

3DMark11 gave us an impressive result for this board with 7966 points.

At Extreme performance settings, the board still gave a good result of 2721.

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 being a GPU based benchmark gave a good set of numbers all round showing again that the Z77M-D3H wasn’t holding anything back.

This was the same scenario at 1920×1080 with our 7970 able to push out over 100fps.

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 second of our gaming benchmarks, Metro 2033, was able to give a great set of results for an entry level board, with 1680X1050 pumping out over 100fps.

Upping the resolution to 1920×1080 does lower the frame rate as we all know, but 5fps below the 100fps mark is still a very good result.