MSI Big Bang XPower II (X79) Motherboard Review

Cinebench R11.5

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

Starting things off with Cinebench, we can see that the the stock performance on the board is a little lower than some of the competition, but only by small amounts and with several retests you can see this number fluctuating, so we took an average score to put into our chart. The overclock really helped push the CPU score up from 9.60 to a whopping 12.74, showing than this X79 board was made to render and calculate, as the 3960X was designed for.

Super PI

Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits.

Firing up Super PI, we can see a time of 10 minutes and 17 seconds which does fall slightly behind the newer Ivy Bridge Z77 based platform but with the assistance of the overclock, we can see a dramatic amount of time being shaved off, almost a whole 3 minutes in fact.