Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H (Z77) Motherboard Ivy 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.

3DMark 11 showed some promising results across all tests, but no real benefit was seen on a major scale with the new Ivybridge processor compared to Sandybridge.

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 a slight increase with the i7 3770k over the i7 2700k but nothing that would be noticeable, but still shows that the i7 3770k is the superior processor, even if only by a small margin.

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 showed some promising results with a 1FPS increase over the 2700k at stock, but a larger 4FPS lead when at 4.6GHz.