MSI X79A-GD65 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.

3DMark 11 showed some good, solid results, with the overclock edging slightly ahead in the Extreme preset, while the Performance preset showed more of an increase.

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.

With heaven being a GPU intensive benchmark, we only saw a slight increase when overclocking the GD65, with a maximum of a 1FPS increase over stock results.

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.

Very much the same story with Metro 2033, though a very small increase was seen at both resolutions when moving from stock to overclocked speeds.