EVGA X99 Classified 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: Running the systems with the ‘Ultra Image Quality’ settings there is very little performance difference between the EVGA X99 Classified and our other systems. The EVGA X99 Classified averaged 84.03 frames per second at 1920×1080, a whopping .14 fps behind the fastest system.

Benchmark Results: In Tomb Raider running the low image quality settings, theEVGA X99 Classified took the top spot with an average of 223.1 frames per second while the ASUS X99 Deluxe averaged 220.13 frames per second at 1920×1080. Dropping the resolution down to 1280×1024 the ASUS X99 Deluxe took a slight lead with an average of 325.27 frames per second while the EVGA X99 Classified averaged 324.60 frames per second.