Blender

Blender is an open-source, free content creation suite of 3D modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities. Originally released in 2002, it's available in versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and several Unix distributions. It supports rigid and soft-body objects and can handle the draping and animation of cloth, as well as the rendering and animation of smoke, water, and general particle handling.

Our Blender test renders multiple frames of an animation of a rotating chunk of ice, with translucency and reflections. Rendering of this model uses ray-tracing algorithms and the program reports the rendering time for each of the animation's 25 frames. The results are a summation of the rendering times for all frames and the lower the score, the better.

A nice progression of performance, here, with the ASUS winning at stock speeds. Overclocking boosts performance in this test by about 15%.

POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision ray tracer is a free, open source 3D modeling program that uses ray-tracing algorithms to generate realistic three-dimensional images. Ray tracing is very computationally intensive, and the POV-Ray program has a handy built-in benchmark to let you check the performance of your system.

Here the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe comes in second, 5% slower than the Intel board.

But there's more to this motherboard's performance than just CPU horsepower. ASUS outfits this motherboard with eight USB 3.0 ports: four from the native controller in the Intel Z77 Express chipset, and four more courtesy of two ASMedia USB 3.0 controllers. ASUS can enhance the performance of each type of connection with their proprietary USB 3.0 Boost. Join me in the next section as I exercise this feature.

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