GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H Intel Z87 ‘Haswell’ 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 world’s 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.

Tomb Raider – Intel HD Graphics

Benchmark Results: Tomb Raider gave the edge to the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H by a small margin compared to the ASUS Maximus VI Hero, though it’s a much more significant margin when we look at the previous generation Intel ‘Ivy Bridge’ platform. The GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H averaged 58 frames per second at 1280×1024 and 38.033 frames per second at 1920×1080. The MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming ‘Ivy Bridge’ averaged 37.3 frames per second at 1280×1024 and 24.5 frames per second at 1920×1080! That’s an improvement of 55% with the Intel HD Graphics 4600 over the HD 4000!

Tomb Raider – ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II

Benchmark Results: With the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II installed into our systems were are seeing very little performance differences between the systems. The GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H was able to average 68.667 frames per second at 1280x1024h and 51.967 frames per second at 1920×1080.