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

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Hardware acceleration is enabled, to call on the CUDA power of the GTX680.

Overall performance is good. The system finishes the video encoding job in 8 minutes and 39 seconds. When overclocked to 4.8ghz the time is reduced to 7 minutes and 16 seconds.

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