MSI Z77A-G45 & Lightning GTX680 Review

1. Introduction2. MSI Lightning GTX6803. MSI Lightning GTX680 (Super High Res Gallery)4. MSI Z77A-G45 Motherboard5. MSI Z77A-G45 Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)6. 77A-G45 BIOS & Overclocking7. Testing Methodology and System8. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra9. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.510. Synthetic: PCmark 711. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage12. Synthetic: 3DMark 1113. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark14. Synthetic: SSD Performance15. Real World: 3D Rendering16. Real World: Media Encoding17. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs18. Gaming: Hitman Absolution19. Gaming: Far Cry 320. Gaming: F1 201221. Gaming: Total War Shogun 222. Technical: GPU Acoustics23. Technical: GPU Thermal Dynamics24. Technical: GPU Power Consumption25. Technical: GPU Overclocking26. Closing Thoughts27. View All Pages

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We created a new 8200×3200 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render.

The final time is close to the leading board in this test, the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, only a second slower and not really noticeable in the ‘real world'.

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