ASUS Maximus VII Impact mITX Intel Z97 Motherboard Review

Tomb Raider

On March 5th, 2013 Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.

The game has been built on Crystal Dynamics’s game engine called the “Crystal Engine” and the graphics look fantastic. AMD and Crystal Dyanmic’s worked on a new technology called TressFX Hair, which AMD describes as the worlds first in-game implementation of a real-time, per-strand hair physics system for this game title. We set the image quality to ultimate for benchmarking, but we disabled TressFX Hair under the advanced tab to be fair to NVIDIA graphics cards that don’t support the feature.

Benchmark Results: The ASUS Maximus VII Impact Z97 mITX motherboard was able to take the top spot on the charts once again in Tomb Raider on the Ultra settings. Running the benchmark at 1920×1080 the Maximus VII Impact averaged 84.37 frames per second, dropping the resolution to 1280×1024 the mITX motherboard was able to average 114.80 frames per second.

Benchmark Results: In Tomb Raider running the low image quality settings, the ASUS Maximus VII Impact Z97 mITX motherboard averaged 222.97 frames per second at 1920×1080 and 329.50 frames per second