MSI Big Bang XPower II (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.

Taking a look at some gaming related benchmarks, we open up 3DMark 11 and find that the stock performance on the Big Bang XPower II gives some strong numbers putting it just above the Rampage IV Extreme from Asus. The overclock to 4.6GHz helps unleash the performance and boost both Extreme and Performance scores.

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.

Within Metro 2033, we can see the Big Bang XPower II giving quite low results, even when overclocked as the performance didn’t increase at all. we saw the Sniper M3 giving the same results as the other boards we tested. The overclock allowed an extra 1FPS on both resolutions, but this is nothing that is noticeable.