ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition Intel X79 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 Rampage IV Black Edition and the MSI Big Bang XPower II were once again trading blows. The ASUS was able to take the lead at 1280×1024 with an average of 113.83 fps while the MSI averaged 113.7 fps. Running the benchmark at 1920×1080 the MSI took the win with an average of 83.37 frames per second while the ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition average 83.13 frames per second. I think it’s fair to say that our Intel X79 boards are pretty well matched with each other in the games so far.