Asrock presumably thinks this atrocious performance won't be noticed by the budget buyers at this end of the market, but they are making a serious commercial miscalculation by putting out this garbage because enthusiasts get a bad impression of the whole brand and they end up influencing which brands even budget buyers will purchase. Thanks Steve for doing the hard work to call out this bs
@@GewelReal b450 pro 4 was a decent board for its price , but yeah, just like biostar only buy it if you need a cheap board fast (in my country sometimes they can be found with 50-60% sale)
I have used quite a bit of well made asrock boards that both lasted and performed. I truly think their choices for the low end ones hurt their business much more than they save cutting corners on the low end ones to be fair
haha! i was thinking how surreal it was to see the product seductively rotating while hearing bad things about it. like when a movie has nightmarish violence, but peaceful background music :-)
Interesting how most Z690 motherboards seem to vary between significant and extreme overkill in the VRM, while Asrock sits in the corner alone eating paste while not even being cheaper in many regions. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during whatever kind of meeting decides their market strategy - for some reason the villain roundtable from Austin Powers comes to mind.
@@standarsh8056 Too bad most of their budget boards are just hot garbage, their false advertising makes it even worse. Even most of their high end boards have horrible VRMs
It really is interesting, since other brands can hit the price point with much better performance, so you can make money at that price point and not be a jerk. How much do they really expect to make by cutting/erasing the corners?
Careful Steve, ASRock might start trying to sabotage you for calling them out lol. I bet they'd rather hire hackers and bots than to design a motherboard that's just mediocre instead of electronic garbage.
Their thought with this board is probably, that no one in the right mind will buy the cheapest board to pair with the most expensive CPU. Put a 12100F or 12400 on there, and it would be just fine. It's their marketing thats wrong, not the board design. Like putting a 5950x in an A520, where i'd also not expect the MB to wrangle max performance out of that CPU either.
@@MyrKnof The problems with that train of thought is that VRM heat is always bad, since it means that the lifespan of the motherboard's components is affected, and that this motherboard is just far below it's price class in VRM efficiency/heat dissipation. And the comparison with it's price class is what matters, the chipset is just one of the features a motherboard can have.
@@MyrKnof It's not even the lowest end chipset though. Saving money on the motherboard to get a better CPU (say, the 12600k/12700) is perfectly reasonable and the other boards in the video showed it *can* be done for around the same price.
@@NightKev Yeah, you can theoretically get the full performance out of a 5950X in a motherboard that literally lacks a chipset (X300, PRO 500), and some enterprise consumers will do just that. The chipset is just one of the things that determines the featureset, segmentating better VRM's behind better chipsets is just an artificial - if generally reasonable - policy of most motherboard vendors. If you don't need the features the chipset gives you, like the 14 max SATA ports (!?) on X570, they're simply wasted. IMO anything that runs 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes is enough for a gaming motherboard, so a B660 is an entirely reasonable choice and a well-designed "gaming motherboard" VRM should run an 8 P-core CPU at full speed, without cooking itself to death in the process.
@@TheFirestriker101 yeah but this one is actually downgraded from the last gen (B560M), lol. One fewer power phase there. These things are built to a price. Asrock have a shitty B660 board, a shitty H670 board, a shitty Z690 board, all designed to sell to people who buy by chipset. Actually it's not only Asrock, Gigabyte put out an absolute steaming turd of a shitboard in the shape of the Z690M DS3H, which takes the B660M DS3H (kinda crappy) and replaces the B660 for a Z690 to fool the 'must have Z690' users. You don't have to buy these 'fake' boards tho, Gigabyte have some nice boards out there as well.
Asrock cannot design decent VRMs for anything but their high-end boards, it seems. Z690M-ITX has a hard 150W power limit, what's the point of a Z chipset on it then?
ASRock quality never fall of the cliff, they compete on the lower level with Gigabyte for decades now, these boards cut down to bear minimum and significantly cheaper than other brands like MSI. Everyday users use integer workloads not powerviruses like reviewers, even if you want to use your CPU for video coding, probably steaming during gaming it's still realtime with just 60FPS with 6000Kbps. Look ASUS and their TUF series it's their bouild down effort, sounds fancy but bearly better than the base model.
I'd say this goes beyond just false advertising, it's straight up a scam. It's a terrible product that should not be purchased, period. Anyone that bought one should return it if they still can.
I thin "Machiavellian ethics" describes it better than "Chinese ethics". Sure the CCP does that, but Chinese ethics could easily describe Confuscianism.
I can say they're not a scam nor a terrible product. I bought two of these. They work great with my i3 12100s using the stock cooler, and I'm absolutely not returning them. They're great. I didn't want to waste money on a pointlessly overpowered VRM that these systems are never going to need. Hopefully HU includes a 6 core i5 in their b660 roundup, as I'm curious if this board will be a good match for those chips (and hopefully they use the stock intel heatsink these chips come with rather than a tower or liquid cooler that starves the VRM of airflow).
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
I don't blame Asrock for this at all, making all those NFTs must be quite time consuming and resource intensive. You can't expect them to waste those resources on products with actual utility like motherboards. After all why would you sell something when you can sell literally nothing for even more money? It just makes sense.
@@chrys9256 that wasn't the point... the word "literally" was totally unnecessary in your sentence. It's like having a word that adds no usefull meaning.
@@PreySim I’d say it was about as necessary as saying that something is “totally” unnecessary. Apparently you think there’s varying degrees of unnecessary and didn’t want me to think my word choice was only a little bit unnecessary.
I don't see how they would lose sales if they only listed the 65w CPU's. People getting anything with 125w CPU's wouldn't buy this anyway. By hiding the BIOS limit they just make themselves look shady for no reason at all
Even for "65W" parts this motherboard can be considered a failure... $20,- to run the vrm a massive 50+ °C cooler is definitely not a "pass" for this piece of junk.
Well, many of us upgrade our systems over the time, not in one go. And most other motherboards can easily survive two generations. Now I need a new motherboard to support modern hardware , initially I plan to populate it with a small i3 to keep costs under control but with the idea to upgrade to a superior CPU on my next investment. But with this model I will be a fail, The publicity of this product is certainly misleading , Ashrock
I actually bought this knowing it is garbage.... my friend have very tight budget, and he is just running 12100, this board is actually same price as H610 board, so I guess the shop know this is hot turd.
@@MyrKnof I was hoping maaaaybe raptor lake 12400F replacement would be okay on this board, if Intel power draw is still somewhat under control, besides, I can buy a tray cpu for him and just reuse stock cooler.
It wasn´t always like that. My ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer was a very good one. It had Dual BIOS (and both BIOS chips were removable) and lots of other functions, that are nowadays only on very expensive "premium" motherboards. Its only issue was the Killer LAN, which didn´t work properly at all, but it had an easy fix, since it was Qualcomm LAN chip, it only took replacing Killer driver with standard Qualcomm driver. I also have ASRock B450M-Pro4. Good so far. Although i don´t understand ASRock discouraging users from updating the BIOS. Every manufacturer has some kinks & issues.
@@raul0ca Yes I got the b450m pro 4 and it runs even Ryzen 2700 fine .. and that is a budget board and the 2700 pulls around 140W at full load. This b660 HDV costs 40% more and has problems with sustaining 95W ..... trash It's the last 2 years that ASRock for some reason cheaps out on all Mobo components but keeps about same price as competition eventhough their product is trash.
Crazy thing is.. They *KNEW* hub would rip them a new one for doing this. Yet they still (for a quick buck) chose to push out this product. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know then I don't know what does.
Clearly they calculated that the damage done by negative reviews was less than the profits the board will bring in. Will definitely do what I can to tip the scale in the other direction by recommending my friends not use this board.
Glad I dodged that bullet. Picked up a Asus B660-m Prime instead for my I5 12400f. I heard the rumors about this board and you guys have just confirmed what I have heard. Thanks for the good work in educating us.
I was playing games whilst listening to the vid...when he said "soyo" I had to stop playing and check I had just heard right. A name I've not heard for absolutely yonks.
They are not quite the same, previously Taiwanese with US headquarters and now the rights exist in Shenzhen, China and mainly deal in that market. Judging by this review, they aren't doing a bad job with the name. I would like to see a full review of this board, same for any other Chinese brand such as Colorful.
@@PainterVierax I'm an American. I know Soyo because they made some of the best boards in the 90s and early 2000s. I have a Soyo Dragon II at home in a retro build.
We picked this up on sale for under $65 and paired it with a 12400f for a super budget but modern build, stuck some aluminum heatsinks on the VRMs and power phases, and called it good. We had low expectations and knew what we were getting, but for the price, it's been great. The deceptive marketing is another matter.. I'd guess most potential buyers aren't scouring TH-cam and reddit for info.
Hi bro I got the b660m-hdv with core i5 12400 and rtx 3060 But I saw this video now Should I change the board or it is ok with i5 12400? Like this comment if you reply 🙏
The problem with Assrock is that yes, they do sell to first time system builders on Newegg if they can, but their main bread and butter is 2nd tier system integrators like NZXT. The integrator will list all the sales points like GPU, CPU memory and storage, and then right at the bottom will be the Assrock e-waste. There's a reason why Assrock's company name is so close to Asus.
Well to be fair it's one of those "HDV" series that's not meant to be used with Core i9 in the first place. It's listed as supported because it's a "CPU support list", that's not the same as "best pairing list". tl;dr - don't use highest end CPU with almost lowest-end motherboard. It won't work out well.
@@MohdKhairulZaman What CPU will you be using? If i3 12100f - i5 12400f for gaming purposes, yes works just fine. There's even the H610M-HDV/M.2. However if you can save up a bit more I recommend the Pro RS model or even better, the PG Riptide.
I appreciate the quality and honesty of videos like this. I'm planning a build later this year on AM5, and to be honest, I won't be buying from Asrock even if they have a quality board that I'm looking for and for the right price. OEMs need to be held to a higher standard, and it is very telling of their moral character, given their reaction to consumer representatives like you guys and others. What grinds my gears more here is what seems to be an attempt of ripping off people who can only afford cheaper boards anyway. So purposefully victimizing either those with little cash, or taking advantage of the uninformed. There is always room for forgiveness, given that they own their crap. Until then, I personally have Asrock blacklisted. Thanks for the hard work and top-quality content! 👌😊
You'd probably be better off buying from the company's former parent (Asus). Sure, you'd pretty much have to pay more, but you're much more likely to get a quality product (and, in all likelihood, better customer service).
Such a shame to see this. I used to really rate Asrock. I am still running a fatality x79 champion on my 2nd rig. To see them make such a crappy product is disheartening
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
Have you guys noticed that Asrock has been making crap boards for at least 3+ years. Not sure why this is. They also are dropping the ball on the bios settings.
ASRock always made build down motherboards, it is not a new phenomenon. They are close partner to Intel, in socket 1156-1155 era Intel tried to build even cheaper motherboards than ASRock, but failed miserebly due to bad BIOS support, basically BIOS update bricked their boards.
Tbf, this board is like the cheapest b660m on the market (half the price of that MSi board on the video), and in the same price range of other brand h610m, if you can afford better board, dont ever consider this board, but if budget limited and only can afford h610m or this b660m board, i rather take this board
I am here... To thank you for your great work guys 😁 Could I take the opportunity to ask if you guys could look into and bring up the issue with the Asus Strixx 3080? I feel like Asus got a free pass on their unfriendly shroud design and QC issues on that card just because supply shortages meant that the outage was generally self contained.
It's a whole thing. Expensive motherboards get masses of phases as well as incredible thermal interventions. This is stupid, as many phases and good VRMs actually produce less heat, so the good thermal solutions belong on boards with fewer phases and boards with many phases are more often able to get away with less comprehensive thermal solutions. The consumer has confused premium with necessity, as they expect expensive boards to have both lots of phases and big thermal solutions (of which only one is necessary) but also are fine with cheaper boards to have both fewer phases and nothing to cool the increased load with! It's a bit silly across the entire industry
I agree with you that a low end CPU is a better pairing for that board but it was Asrock who claimed that CPU was supported on this board as per their website. They state that "CPU performance may be limited due to power phase design" but fail to specify which ones in the list that applies to.
I have a DVS board (just HDV without HDMI port) that can longer enter (UEFI) BIOS setup once I install my PCI-E M.2 adapter card "lol". (I recently confirmed that the card has no such problems in another board (newer chipset).)
When you are making that 20 B660 board roundup, please also include a chart where we can see which board can run for example 12700 at higher power limit indefinitely and which boards will dial down the performance. Basically, best B660 boards from lowest budget that can deliver the full potential of 12700 & 12600K. Also, an opinion on pairing the K SKUs with B series boards, considering the user never plans to do any overclocking (like 12600K + B660).
@@mirage8753 You just watched the video, budget boards have vrm heatsinks too, and there will be more in future. But not all heatsink boards can handle 12700/12600K/12900 at its full capacity indefinitely.
@@omarkhalidshohag1474 there is an old rule, if you want to get everything out from your cpu then buy more beefy board. its the case for latests gens of cpus. i mean what the point to buy cpus you listed on b mobos? i think all 6+ core intel cpus for intel 8gen+ require z mobo if you want to get everything from cpu, especially if you want to overclock. its not the same as amd on b450/550. also im pretty much sure all mobos in this video can handle 12400/12500 without any problem. also Steve could disable some cores on 12600k to check this, but he didnt
Enough with the clickbait guys, I expected better from you. ASRock B660M-HDV - under $100 (USD) Soyo B660M classic - ~$140 (USD) MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI - ~$150 (USD) Come on HUB, I know you have an axe to grind with ASRock but this is going too far. The ASRock B660M PRO RS would have been a far more fair comparison to the other 2 boards and even it comes in almost $30 cheaper than the MSI board. ASRock's -HDV line have always been on the ultra low end side of things, the type of board you run at most an i3 in because who spends under $100 (USD) on a board then drops $300+ on the CPU? They certainly can't blame the board when it doesn't perform to expectations, that is on them for poor component choices. Obviously when you compare the cheapest, most budget oriented B660 board against boards far better equipped (and more expensive) it will be the worst performer. Did it crash while gaming? Did it crash during day to day use? These are the only concerns the target market for products in this price bracket have. Almost no one will be using a board like this with more than an i3 installed.
The HDV and B660M-HDV are the same price in Australia. The Soyo B660M classic is also $120 US, you got that wrong, it's just $20 more. Also the MSI B660M-E is much better as we will show soon.
@@Hardwareunboxed Thanks for the reply. Those were the prices I could find for the US and where I live. Still, that $20 makes all the difference in what features can be added (like VRM heatsinks for example). The letter suffix boards have always been cheap and nasty (HDV from ASRock, DSxx from Gigabyte etc). They are built to a price point not to features. I don't even know why you would bother reviewing one, it's not something anyone buys by choice, it's that purchase you make when you are dead broke and absolutely need a PC up and running. No one in that situation needs to be made to feel worse, one would imagine they know full well not to expect it to be the best board out there...
@@Hardwareunboxed I do, and that is on manufacturers, ASRock is far from the only one who's marketing material is skirting too close to falsehood. The simple fact is, if you are on a tight budget and need RAM overclocking, PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset and better USB support/implementation, the B660M HDV may well be your best and only option. $20 where I live is a lot of money to the middle/lower class, it's more than the weekly pension of many elderly here. On top of that, the Soyo would have to ship from China as it isn't stocked here. I hope you see what I am saying, reviews should point out flaws, for sure, but they should also address the use case and price point of the product and how well it serves the market it's targeted at. For someone using a Pentium/Celeron/i3 the HDV will do everything they need without issue. That is what people searching for a review on these kinds of product want to see, not that it's the worst board on the platform. Unless the board blew up, failed or was unstable under perfectly normal conditions, it does what it was designed to. ASRock is one of the only manufacturers that still caters to this end of the market and offers a bare bones, cheap option for those that need it. I still have a B360M HDV in a little box I built for my daughter for school running perfectly for years. With it's i5-9500T and an RX 570 it does everything she needs it to, plays all her games and has never given her a single issue. For most buying boards like this, that is all they need/want from it. Be careful your beef with ASRock does not color your reviews and negatively impact your viewer base is all I am saying. HUB has long been heralded as an honest, unbiased, hard hitting channel with all the benchmarks and data you could want, please stick to that formula, it's what I come here to see.
This is all a waste of time, I know for a fact that the MSI B660M-E is a significantly better product. Also call it for what it is, Asrock isn't " skirting too close to falsehood" they're neck deep in BS and for some reason you're doing your best to justify it.
PC parts get reviewed by non company shills, so I find it incredible that companies still market substandard parts with misleading or just false advertising on purpose. As others have commented, putting out garbage reflects on a company's ENTIRE brand. Corsair's stock case fans I have found to be decent, but I have upgraded every PC I've built (6 so far) to Noctua fans. I have also used Corsair PSU, AIO, ram and cases in every build. After 6 years, 2 of their AIO have died along with 1 ASUS X-99 MB and due to price, reviews and stock issues, I went with Arctic LFII 280 AIO and GSKILL 4x8 ram for X570 MB replacement AMD build. I suggested to my friend to replace his dead AIO (ours died at almost the same 6 year mark) with an air cooler as at the time no one had AIO in stock and an air cooler would be "good enough". For me, Corsair has earned my brand loyalty, but they start purposely putting out substandard parts ON PURPOSE like ASROCK, well, lots of options out there.
Highlighting bad products like this one is just as important as highlighting the good ones. Perhaps even more important. Well done! I have a project stalled because the only available solution (DDR4, B660, ITX) that doesn't cost a fortune is an Asrock board that looks to be every bit as bad as this one. Apparently there are alternatives from Biostar and Gigabyte but they're not actually available up here. And have yet to be reviewed (hint hint). Like all great reviews you prompt questions. You said you had a fan blowing on the VRMs; I wonder how the board would have fared if you had added heatsinks to those VRMs? If you do go back to the board, perhaps you could test that? I also wonder how the board would fare when so modified and paired with a low-end CPU like a 12100 or 12400?
Thanks for the heads up... Very few do this kind of content to warn people of crap products. People like you guys made the budget community feel they are present.
the -HDV series is one of the board ranges ASRock make for the MEA (Middle-East, Africa) region export market. I'm in South Africa and Namibia, this 'thing' is on the shelves of practically every PC store and in so many pre-builts. It sucks even worse here due to our higher ambient temperatures. Piece of Junk
Interesting... I purchased an Asrock board almost 10 years ago that they advertised could run an AMD FX8350 and it would throttle constantly. Like literally a few seconds after you loaded up the cpu it would drop to 1ghz. I got into a massive argument with their tech support and vowed to never buy any of their garbage again.
man I remember when ASRock was a top tier brand . my ASRock z77 extreme 4 still works to this date but bought a b550 steel legend and was very disappointed by it's price and performance
From what I remember, the steel legend did not have any of the garbage vrm performance as shown here right? At most, it is just an medicore board which is overpriced for its tier right?
This has been ASRock's way for as long as they have been in business. They are not going to change. They cater to the low end. MSI was the same when they were still called Micro-Star (frankly, I still view MSI as a bit "low end" because of previous experiences with Micro-Star, though I do currently use an MSI mobo). I agree with the advertising being misleading, thought its not technically false. There is a place for such boards. When I built my home theater PC I bought the cheapest mobo and cpu I could find. All it had to do was run a sound card and a video card. As long as it does its job and is reliable, it does not matter if it can run a monster chip at full performance.
I just built a. Ryzen 5 3600 on an ASRock B550M-HDV and was pleasantly surprised with its performance. I didn’t expect much from this board because it was inexpensive. The bios was something I expected to see in a much more expensive board. It was definitely a wow factor. I did add a heatsink to the VRM’s because this board doesn’t have one. Coupling this board with a 65 Watt Ryzen 3600 does seem to be a good match. Trying to run too much power through this board is probably not a good idea. It’s a budget board and nothing more. Taking it past its limits will surely result in failure.
@@techluvin7691 they advertise the board as supporting all the K-SKU CPUs and while that power stage note is there, most people won't understand what that means, that it'll technically run the 125w K CPUs, but they'll be out of spec and heavily gimped. It isn't completely unreasonable for someone to think this board should be ok for an i5 12600K cause it is a smaller CPU than the i7 or i9 and this is a B660 board not H610, but it'll still be too much for it. They're basically pulling fine print disclaimer crap which is what Steve is pointing out.
@@AshleyHinds Yes, I’ll give him that, but anyone who buys this board isn’t coupling a high end cpu with it……..or at least shouldn’t be. Yes, without a doubt, ASRock should remove the high end CPU support from documentation or at the very least add a disclaimer to the CPU’s that will throttle on this board. In general, when paired with a lower to mid range cpu (ie R5-3600), it’s a decent board with an outstanding bios. Hardware Unboxed should have mentioned this rather then just crapping on the board. That’s my main issue with some of these tech shows. They use hardware that only a small percentage of the population can afford. The need to review more affordable components and not couple a high end cpu and 3080 with a budget board. It is a decent board when coupled with complimentary components and even better when you add heatsinks to the VRM’s. I have DDR 3200 MHz ram overclocked to run at 3600 MHz on this board without issue.
@@techluvin7691 Firstly, did you even watch the whole video? They tested it with a 12400 and proved it was fine in the sane CPU match scenario. The whole issue is their basically false advertising to say it could support the bigger die CPUs just because they technically turn on in the mobo without crashing cause they're throttled to hell, everything 10600K and above with the larger dies including the E cores is a fail (including the non-K "65w" CPUs which also failed) Steve literally said if they advertised it to support only the i5 12400 tops (largest non E core CPU is technically the non-K 12600, but it and the 12500 are just a 12400 with a slight frequency bump) it would be fine as a product, not great but fine because no deception. The deception is the anti-consumer point of the video - if they didn't advertise it as supporting up to the 12900K this video wouldn't have happened
I never imagined that a motherboard could have such a significant impact on performance. I can't believe the power delivery is so bad. How can you do a thing like this and call it anything but a reputation stain? Kudos for you to exposing it.
I was contemplating my first Asrock MB purchase (This board actually) for a more budget build. After seeing this I plan to avoid the brand altogether. I am sure they make some good products but I do not want to have to wade thru a minefield of bad ones (Hopefully finding a video to point them out but not always the case) . I would rather buy from a trusted brand paying a little more knowing they just work and there will be no issues. Thanks Steve.
Defining a trusted brand is in itself difficult in this arena. They have all produced shockers. You are still better going by reviews for individual products rather than just trusting a brands entire range. This goes for most components I've found. In recent times it does seem that Asus is on average producing the best motherboards (but there are stil some not so good ones), gigabyte is suffering some quality issues in this area (and I'm a very long time gigabyte fan so that hurts me to say so) and MSI motherboards in the last few years have done amazing things to drag their reputation out of the fire pit (which is where historically most of their products ended up...I say ended up...they usually cased the fires.....). As bad as this review is, there are still plenty of decent Asrock boards out there, but things like this do sully their reputation and I can understand that if there is an Asrock board and a similarly priced competitor of similar quality, people are likely to be swayed to the competitor.
@@malphadour ASUS is usually okay, but you likely pay more than similar equipped boards. MSI seems like a decent brand in the lower product range in terms of price/featureset if you ask me. Gigabyte is usually horrible when it comes to having to do firmware updates on anything they produce 🙄 I wouldn't recommend unless you never intend to update firmware of their products (even their online guides don't align with the actual products either).
🤣 When you get compared to Soyo (eBay special?) and get smoked it's time to have a long hard look in the mirror and ask if motherboard manufacturing is for you. 🤣 This is a next level burn from Steve and I love it.
lmao it's like comparing a cheap corolla and lexus sport car. You could tell from the price alone. Imagine people who could only afford this board buying high end 12th gen
B660M hdv can only maxed 65W, only for I5 nonK and I3 even though bfb can pass 95W i dont think without VRM heatsink it will stable... they should change their spec list that this board can run 125W... You should also test all cheapest board across all brands. Easiest choose motherboard now is see the VRM heatsink, mofset, and powerphase. All manufacturer making crappy board including last gen MSI B560M-A, asus prime, gigabyte ds3h...
remember when the worst x570 board was because it got hot and needed more cooling? and now the worst is its hot, and cant run the CPUs at all without settings and cooling directly on the VRM. feels real bad, real real bad. motherboard companies need to be held to a higher standard, these arent OEM prebuilds for offices that will never see a compile or game, these are builder boards and corners need to stop being cut. there is a min spec they need to hit.
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
For $80 usd as of writing this board is really good for its' capabilities. It can technically adequately power a 12600 non k and lower with no issues whatsoever as long as you can keep the board itself cool. pcie 4 for both gfx and the main m2 slot and the 2nd m2 slot can be used for wifi/bluetooth cards and it comes with intel lan over realtek garbage and it supports 13th gen stuff. For $80 usd I see nothing wrong with this board as long as it functions properly. These boards shouldn't be judged on their K series chip performance...ever. Z series is for K series chips and B series boards shouldn't even be in the same discussion. as for the 12700 non k, do your research on the boards power limits when buying severely budget boards. it comes with the territory unfortunately. companies are required to support all parts, but not at full capabilities which is why they advertise things such as power limits and power phases etc.
They should add all over their site: "For critical information, please excavate it from annotations, head paragraphs and footnotes scattered around our various Support sections." (Maybe add a trailing asterix with no matching footnote to be found just for appropriate style...)
Just cancelled an order for this exact board on Newegg a few days ago. It is still backordered over there so they are going to sell. If all you want to run is a 12100 or 12400 cheap as possible, this is as inexpensive as it gets (~$95USD at the time of this posting) for B660M support but you're absolutely right. The advertising is misleading at best...outright lying at worst.
i got this board a month back because i was on a super budget so i literally picked the cheapest one, woulda had to pay around 35% more for a decent board (like the msi -a variant) not happy to buy asrock as i very well know its garbage, my old h170m-pro4 sure was, but it works and saved me money, so 🤷♂️ i have to mention though, i paired it with a 12400f, so it really doesn't gimp my performance in any way.
I have this motherboard and my specs are 12th Gen Intel i5-12400F, RTX 3060 TI 32GB of ddr4 ram and i have no complaints games run smoothly with zero issues
Kudos to Steve for attempting to trying to assist this product into achieving its claims by providing additional help in cooling and actually completing the workloads when obviously it wasn’t going to pass. It would have been very easy to call it a day after 10 minutes into the testing. I have always given Asrock a hard pass and will continue to do so in the future until I am shown they can show a legitimate ‘good’ product at a competitive price.
The funny thing is that 10 years ago ASRock was the brand that was forcing the price of good mid-tier boards down. Back then their boards were feature wise on par with the other big three but they just did a minimum of decoration and pointless fandangling in return for really good pricing.
Would like to see some reviews of the itx boards. ASRock B660M-ITX/ac is the only moderately affordable itx boards in my area, wonder if a 12400f can work fine on it. And I remember ASRock AM4 boards being decent (not great but still decent), are they trying to keep the same profit margin/price while Intel is charging them more for the chipset? Or Intel processors are just much more demanding on the vrm?
I love how you're blacklisted, yet still here exposing bad products from bad companies. And here I am being saved from choosing a bad motherboard for my nephews build! TY for you work guys love the channel.
Given that all intel 600 series boards are very expensive compared to AMD (this board is 110 euro here, while perfectly fine b550 boards start at 60 euro) i can totally see people getting the cheapest b660 board (which are the lowest spec ones without memory speed limits) they can for any intel CPU and then getting subpar performance.
This is so crazy, the X370 Taichi on AMD's side was one the best VRM's of all time, that thing is 5 years old and will OC a 5950X without throttling a single % of performance, yet a brand new mobo in 2022 gets worse performance in its branch than a 5 y.o flagship? I think the main reason for this dissapointment has to be the rough times Taiwan is currently going under, things are getting out of hand in the real world and just like the 8th gen consoles being designed under an economic crisis made them trash, im sure the current situation in Taiwan is affecting all brands, albeit, unequally, Asrock never had the capital to take as much pain as Asus or Gigabyte.
They also charge a premium for Taichi boards. The problem here is that budget buyers are going to get stung badly. If you're already talking $700 CPUs and $500 motherboards it's not the end of the world if you get a dud. You'll order another (grumpily) and start the RMA process. People who buy these $90 boards are typically stacking their pennies, so they'll be stuck without a working computer if they return the board and have to wait for the gods to decide.
Actually this motherboard should work perfectly for anyone using the stock cooler. Its very impressive my i3 would instantly go to 100c at like 2ghz under load. So anyone planning on using the stock cooler will have no issues with this board.
I dont agree that boards like these have no purpose in the market. If you were to look for a cheap board to run a i5-12400f with box cooler, this'd be the cheapest option. It'd have a place, if they were just honest about their spec. That said, if the cost to them to improve this to meet the spec of the entire lineup are insignificant, you can make the argument that this is more e-waste than a viable product. You can even see the holes for the heatsinks are in the board, it can't cost much to put some pieces of aluminium on it and increase the TDP spec...
Can you keep us updated on Bios revisions of the MSI board that was sitting at 103 degrees? I'm wondering if they are launching the boards with agressive power profiles for reviews and then cut performance to bring down thermals in later bios releases.
This board probably is best paired with an i3-12100 for those on a super tight budget, but then you have no upgrade path since higher end CPUs are gimped with the board.
Man haven’t held a Soyo motherboard since the 90s, always good quality and affordable. I built and repaired hundreds and hundreds of white box PCs using Soyo boards back in the day.
I am amazed from how consistent Asrock is in their lineup generation after generation!…
as consistent in quality as nickelback
IKR, dogshit for years
@@zavoxd7604 lol..
The fact thay are able to leads me to suspect that alot of these boards are going into prebuit systems.
my ASRock z590 Extreme has served me well for quite a while now, surely not all of them are terrible, right?
Asrock presumably thinks this atrocious performance won't be noticed by the budget buyers at this end of the market, but they are making a serious commercial miscalculation by putting out this garbage because enthusiasts get a bad impression of the whole brand and they end up influencing which brands even budget buyers will purchase. Thanks Steve for doing the hard work to call out this bs
you're saying that as if AsRock was ever worth it
Yeah and most budget buyers like me. Waits and watches reviews before buying
@@GewelReal b450 pro 4 was a decent board for its price , but yeah, just like biostar only buy it if you need a cheap board fast (in my country sometimes they can be found with 50-60% sale)
I have used quite a bit of well made asrock boards that both lasted and performed. I truly think their choices for the low end ones hurt their business much more than they save cutting corners on the low end ones to be fair
I disagree, they have made terrible boards for years now and seem to not be stopping. They not only don't care in the budget market but in general.
Good motherboards are now jealous because of those beautiful B-Roll shots.
haha! i was thinking how surreal it was to see the product seductively rotating while hearing bad things about it. like when a movie has nightmarish violence, but peaceful background music :-)
Interesting how most Z690 motherboards seem to vary between significant and extreme overkill in the VRM, while Asrock sits in the corner alone eating paste while not even being cheaper in many regions. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during whatever kind of meeting decides their market strategy - for some reason the villain roundtable from Austin Powers comes to mind.
All the non budget asrock boards are fine. Even some of the budget ones are also fine.
@@standarsh8056 Too bad most of their budget boards are just hot garbage, their false advertising makes it even worse. Even most of their high end boards have horrible VRMs
@@drunkhusband6257 yes there is, if the cpu would melt itself before the vrms would hit max temp. It's overkill
gigabyte makes the garbage trash z690m ds3h board which is every bit as bad as this.
It really is interesting, since other brands can hit the price point with much better performance, so you can make money at that price point and not be a jerk. How much do they really expect to make by cutting/erasing the corners?
Careful Steve, ASRock might start trying to sabotage you for calling them out lol.
I bet they'd rather hire hackers and bots than to design a motherboard that's just mediocre instead of electronic garbage.
Their thought with this board is probably, that no one in the right mind will buy the cheapest board to pair with the most expensive CPU. Put a 12100F or 12400 on there, and it would be just fine. It's their marketing thats wrong, not the board design.
Like putting a 5950x in an A520, where i'd also not expect the MB to wrangle max performance out of that CPU either.
@@MyrKnof The problems with that train of thought is that VRM heat is always bad, since it means that the lifespan of the motherboard's components is affected, and that this motherboard is just far below it's price class in VRM efficiency/heat dissipation.
And the comparison with it's price class is what matters, the chipset is just one of the features a motherboard can have.
@@MyrKnof It's not even the lowest end chipset though. Saving money on the motherboard to get a better CPU (say, the 12600k/12700) is perfectly reasonable and the other boards in the video showed it *can* be done for around the same price.
@@NightKev Yeah, you can theoretically get the full performance out of a 5950X in a motherboard that literally lacks a chipset (X300, PRO 500), and some enterprise consumers will do just that.
The chipset is just one of the things that determines the featureset, segmentating better VRM's behind better chipsets is just an artificial - if generally reasonable - policy of most motherboard vendors. If you don't need the features the chipset gives you, like the 14 max SATA ports (!?) on X570, they're simply wasted.
IMO anything that runs 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes is enough for a gaming motherboard, so a B660 is an entirely reasonable choice and a well-designed "gaming motherboard" VRM should run an 8 P-core CPU at full speed, without cooking itself to death in the process.
@@MyrKnof Actually, Tech Yes City did a video where he put a 5950x in a cheap A520, and performance wasn’t far off from better boards
Man, ASRock fell of the cliff with quality of their products - like seriously, at this point it's just mostly hot overpriced garbage indeed
Yeah same thing with its graphic cards !!
Hdv was always cheeks
@@TheFirestriker101 yeah but this one is actually downgraded from the last gen (B560M), lol. One fewer power phase there. These things are built to a price. Asrock have a shitty B660 board, a shitty H670 board, a shitty Z690 board, all designed to sell to people who buy by chipset.
Actually it's not only Asrock, Gigabyte put out an absolute steaming turd of a shitboard in the shape of the Z690M DS3H, which takes the B660M DS3H (kinda crappy) and replaces the B660 for a Z690 to fool the 'must have Z690' users.
You don't have to buy these 'fake' boards tho, Gigabyte have some nice boards out there as well.
Asrock cannot design decent VRMs for anything but their high-end boards, it seems. Z690M-ITX has a hard 150W power limit, what's the point of a Z chipset on it then?
ASRock quality never fall of the cliff, they compete on the lower level with Gigabyte for decades now, these boards cut down to bear minimum and significantly cheaper than other brands like MSI.
Everyday users use integer workloads not powerviruses like reviewers, even if you want to use your CPU for video coding, probably steaming during gaming it's still realtime with just 60FPS with 6000Kbps.
Look ASUS and their TUF series it's their bouild down effort, sounds fancy but bearly better than the base model.
I'd say this goes beyond just false advertising, it's straight up a scam. It's a terrible product that should not be purchased, period. Anyone that bought one should return it if they still can.
Chinese Ethics. If you can cheat someone, you should.
I thin "Machiavellian ethics" describes it better than "Chinese ethics".
Sure the CCP does that, but Chinese ethics could easily describe Confuscianism.
I can say they're not a scam nor a terrible product. I bought two of these. They work great with my i3 12100s using the stock cooler, and I'm absolutely not returning them. They're great. I didn't want to waste money on a pointlessly overpowered VRM that these systems are never going to need. Hopefully HU includes a 6 core i5 in their b660 roundup, as I'm curious if this board will be a good match for those chips (and hopefully they use the stock intel heatsink these chips come with rather than a tower or liquid cooler that starves the VRM of airflow).
@@jomeyqmalone you are supporting a bad company though, who shouldn't be able to get away with these boards being this poor
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
These reviews (and the monitor reviews) are why I like this channel so much. Keep at it!
Big Same. They are so thorough in all their critiques.
Your continued testing of these crap boards so we can avoid them is admirable, thank you
I don't blame Asrock for this at all, making all those NFTs must be quite time consuming and resource intensive. You can't expect them to waste those resources on products with actual utility like motherboards. After all why would you sell something when you can sell literally nothing for even more money? It just makes sense.
Savage.
Too bad you don't know what "literally" means.
@@PreySim Don’t I? Then please tell me what exactly it is you own when you buy an NFT.
@@chrys9256 that wasn't the point... the word "literally" was totally unnecessary in your sentence. It's like having a word that adds no usefull meaning.
@@PreySim I’d say it was about as necessary as saying that something is “totally” unnecessary. Apparently you think there’s varying degrees of unnecessary and didn’t want me to think my word choice was only a little bit unnecessary.
This is probably one of the best examples of how bad a budget product can get, and how not all motherboards are created equal.
I don't see how they would lose sales if they only listed the 65w CPU's. People getting anything with 125w CPU's wouldn't buy this anyway.
By hiding the BIOS limit they just make themselves look shady for no reason at all
Even for "65W" parts this motherboard can be considered a failure... $20,- to run the vrm a massive 50+ °C cooler is definitely not a "pass" for this piece of junk.
Well, many of us upgrade our systems over the time, not in one go. And most other motherboards can easily survive two generations. Now I need a new motherboard to support modern hardware , initially I plan to populate it with a small i3 to keep costs under control but with the idea to upgrade to a superior CPU on my next investment. But with this model I will be a fail, The publicity of this product is certainly misleading , Ashrock
I actually bought this knowing it is garbage.... my friend have very tight budget, and he is just running 12100, this board is actually same price as H610 board, so I guess the shop know this is hot turd.
it will be fine with that CPU. Not many upgrade options though.
@@MyrKnof I was hoping maaaaybe raptor lake 12400F replacement would be okay on this board, if Intel power draw is still somewhat under control, besides, I can buy a tray cpu for him and just reuse stock cooler.
@@Verpal You will be ok with a 12400, but nothing above that.
HDV series is always the most basic board to run low end CPU, sadly they claim that this board support high end CPU 🤣
This video made me remember this very old video:
th-cam.com/video/8zTzpYjQ2MM/w-d-xo.html
We should be happy, the fire didn´t happen here.
Agree 👍 this channel don't get ASRock high end motherboard for review
I'd be reluctant to ever consider any ASRock board knowing how much they skimp on their budget Intel boards.
I had multiple ASRock Mobos in the past but now I have totally turned my back on all their products due to their useless BIOS & Poor Quality
It wasn´t always like that. My ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer was a very good one. It had Dual BIOS (and both BIOS chips were removable) and lots of other functions, that are nowadays only on very expensive "premium" motherboards. Its only issue was the Killer LAN, which didn´t work properly at all, but it had an easy fix, since it was Qualcomm LAN chip, it only took replacing Killer driver with standard Qualcomm driver.
I also have ASRock B450M-Pro4. Good so far. Although i don´t understand ASRock discouraging users from updating the BIOS.
Every manufacturer has some kinks & issues.
It's OK on the AMD side. Just don't overclock your CPU or RAM
@@raul0ca Yes I got the b450m pro 4 and it runs even Ryzen 2700 fine .. and that is a budget board and the 2700 pulls around 140W at full load.
This b660 HDV costs 40% more and has problems with sustaining 95W ..... trash
It's the last 2 years that ASRock for some reason cheaps out on all Mobo components but keeps about same price as competition eventhough their product is trash.
Crazy thing is..
They *KNEW* hub would rip them a new one for doing this.
Yet they still (for a quick buck) chose to push out this product.
If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know then I don't know what does.
Clearly they calculated that the damage done by negative reviews was less than the profits the board will bring in.
Will definitely do what I can to tip the scale in the other direction by recommending my friends not use this board.
You're winning Asrock back with each review, eh? 😂😂 Well done!!
Glad I dodged that bullet. Picked up a Asus B660-m Prime instead for my I5 12400f. I heard the rumors about this board and you guys have just confirmed what I have heard. Thanks for the good work in educating us.
you could pretty much be fine with 12400 on this mobo
@@mirage8753 Yeah it's only problematic if you're going with 12600k, or 13400 which has e cores that cause a lot of heat and power consumption.
as soon as i see only 2 mem slots on an atx/ micro atx board, i run away.
It's nice to see that Soyo is still making decent motherboards. Once again, y'all have made a great video for us!
I was playing games whilst listening to the vid...when he said "soyo" I had to stop playing and check I had just heard right. A name I've not heard for absolutely yonks.
Were do you guys live? Here in europe this brand is unknown unlike Biostar.
They are not quite the same, previously Taiwanese with US headquarters and now the rights exist in Shenzhen, China and mainly deal in that market. Judging by this review, they aren't doing a bad job with the name. I would like to see a full review of this board, same for any other Chinese brand such as Colorful.
@@PainterVierax I'm an American. I know Soyo because they made some of the best boards in the 90s and early 2000s. I have a Soyo Dragon II at home in a retro build.
@@AshtonCoolman I see Thanks. We had reputable brands like Abit during this era but AFAIK Soyo never entered our market.
Asrock really saving pennies out here by running VRM naked and without a basic heatsink
Are you still blacklisted by Asrock?
Asrock about to hit you with the Vantablacklist.
We picked this up on sale for under $65 and paired it with a 12400f for a super budget but modern build, stuck some aluminum heatsinks on the VRMs and power phases, and called it good.
We had low expectations and knew what we were getting, but for the price, it's been great.
The deceptive marketing is another matter.. I'd guess most potential buyers aren't scouring TH-cam and reddit for info.
Hi bro
I got the b660m-hdv with core i5 12400 and rtx 3060
But I saw this video now
Should I change the board or it is ok with i5 12400?
Like this comment if you reply 🙏
@@azez_sg Test the board with your current gear and see if it was worth it then show us your results.
The problem with Assrock is that yes, they do sell to first time system builders on Newegg if they can, but their main bread and butter is 2nd tier system integrators like NZXT. The integrator will list all the sales points like GPU, CPU memory and storage, and then right at the bottom will be the Assrock e-waste. There's a reason why Assrock's company name is so close to Asus.
The reason ASRock's name is so close to ASUS is because they were started by ASUS then spun off into a separate company in 2002.
Some motherboard manufacturers just never learn :)
Well to be fair it's one of those "HDV" series that's not meant to be used with Core i9 in the first place.
It's listed as supported because it's a "CPU support list", that's not the same as "best pairing list".
tl;dr - don't use highest end CPU with almost lowest-end motherboard. It won't work out well.
Good day sir, mind if i'm asking, If i'm in a tight budget, this motherboard would still be fine then?
@@MohdKhairulZaman What CPU will you be using?
If i3 12100f - i5 12400f for gaming purposes, yes works just fine. There's even the H610M-HDV/M.2.
However if you can save up a bit more I recommend the Pro RS model or even better, the PG Riptide.
@@goldfries thanks for the reply and the recommendations, i'll be using i3 12100f for the cpu and gtx1060 for the gpu.
Companies that have multiple reviewers blacklisted is a red flag in and of itself.
This is the cheapest B660 board over here, so it seems like a good buy at first. Kinda sad, my Asrock Z97 anniversary going strong.
I appreciate the quality and honesty of videos like this. I'm planning a build later this year on AM5, and to be honest, I won't be buying from Asrock even if they have a quality board that I'm looking for and for the right price.
OEMs need to be held to a higher standard, and it is very telling of their moral character, given their reaction to consumer representatives like you guys and others. What grinds my gears more here is what seems to be an attempt of ripping off people who can only afford cheaper boards anyway. So purposefully victimizing either those with little cash, or taking advantage of the uninformed.
There is always room for forgiveness, given that they own their crap. Until then, I personally have Asrock blacklisted. Thanks for the hard work and top-quality content! 👌😊
You'd probably be better off buying from the company's former parent (Asus). Sure, you'd pretty much have to pay more, but you're much more likely to get a quality product (and, in all likelihood, better customer service).
Someone is not going to be on Asrocks Christmas list this year 😝
We've been blacklisted for 2 years now, so probably not ;)
Such a shame to see this. I used to really rate Asrock. I am still running a fatality x79 champion on my 2nd rig. To see them make such a crappy product is disheartening
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
Have you guys noticed that Asrock has been making crap boards for at least 3+ years. Not sure why this is. They also are dropping the ball on the bios settings.
ASRock always made build down motherboards, it is not a new phenomenon. They are close partner to Intel, in socket 1156-1155 era Intel tried to build even cheaper motherboards than ASRock, but failed miserebly due to bad BIOS support, basically BIOS update bricked their boards.
Tbf, this board is like the cheapest b660m on the market (half the price of that MSi board on the video), and in the same price range of other brand h610m, if you can afford better board, dont ever consider this board, but if budget limited and only can afford h610m or this b660m board, i rather take this board
My z590 Extreme isn't crap at all, what are you talking about
Any time, Steve says "minimum specification" I get a craving for potato chips.
Because they are more readily available than most computer chips?
I am here... To thank you for your great work guys 😁
Could I take the opportunity to ask if you guys could look into and bring up the issue with the Asus Strixx 3080? I feel like Asus got a free pass on their unfriendly shroud design and QC issues on that card just because supply shortages meant that the outage was generally self contained.
It's a whole thing. Expensive motherboards get masses of phases as well as incredible thermal interventions. This is stupid, as many phases and good VRMs actually produce less heat, so the good thermal solutions belong on boards with fewer phases and boards with many phases are more often able to get away with less comprehensive thermal solutions. The consumer has confused premium with necessity, as they expect expensive boards to have both lots of phases and big thermal solutions (of which only one is necessary) but also are fine with cheaper boards to have both fewer phases and nothing to cool the increased load with! It's a bit silly across the entire industry
You should benchmark this with i3-12100, because only this combo is realistic
I agree with you that a low end CPU is a better pairing for that board but it was Asrock who claimed that CPU was supported on this board as per their website. They state that "CPU performance may be limited due to power phase design" but fail to specify which ones in the list that applies to.
I'd accept that for future x610 releases, this is just atrocious. Supposedly mid-range board should be able to run whatever CPU
As a customer who has previously had asrock hdv motherboards stay away from them had nothing but problems with them
I have a DVS board (just HDV without HDMI port) that can longer enter (UEFI) BIOS setup once I install my PCI-E M.2 adapter card "lol". (I recently confirmed that the card has no such problems in another board (newer chipset).)
Oh man, I really love HUs endless vendetta against ASRock 😂
When you are making that 20 B660 board roundup, please also include a chart where we can see which board can run for example 12700 at higher power limit indefinitely and which boards will dial down the performance. Basically, best B660 boards from lowest budget that can deliver the full potential of 12700 & 12600K. Also, an opinion on pairing the K SKUs with B series boards, considering the user never plans to do any overclocking (like 12600K + B660).
the ones with heatsinks on vrm obviously, but they more expensive usually
@@mirage8753 You just watched the video, budget boards have vrm heatsinks too, and there will be more in future. But not all heatsink boards can handle 12700/12600K/12900 at its full capacity indefinitely.
@@omarkhalidshohag1474 there is an old rule, if you want to get everything out from your cpu then buy more beefy board. its the case for latests gens of cpus. i mean what the point to buy cpus you listed on b mobos? i think all 6+ core intel cpus for intel 8gen+ require z mobo if you want to get everything from cpu, especially if you want to overclock. its not the same as amd on b450/550. also im pretty much sure all mobos in this video can handle 12400/12500 without any problem. also Steve could disable some cores on 12600k to check this, but he didnt
Once again testing with high end CPUs, that doesn't really make any sense.
Who on earth would pair a ultra budget motherboard with a high end CPU?
The 12700 is an unrealistic paring with a B660 board is it? Also you'd never upgrade from a Core i3 to the 12700?
Imagine a universe where Asrock wasnt an absolute meme
So basically a few years back? Yeah it was pretty cool.
ASRock: You are now on double secret blacklist (Animal House reference) LOL
Enough with the clickbait guys, I expected better from you.
ASRock B660M-HDV - under $100 (USD)
Soyo B660M classic - ~$140 (USD)
MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI - ~$150 (USD)
Come on HUB, I know you have an axe to grind with ASRock but this is going too far. The ASRock B660M PRO RS would have been a far more fair comparison to the other 2 boards and even it comes in almost $30 cheaper than the MSI board. ASRock's -HDV line have always been on the ultra low end side of things, the type of board you run at most an i3 in because who spends under $100 (USD) on a board then drops $300+ on the CPU? They certainly can't blame the board when it doesn't perform to expectations, that is on them for poor component choices. Obviously when you compare the cheapest, most budget oriented B660 board against boards far better equipped (and more expensive) it will be the worst performer. Did it crash while gaming? Did it crash during day to day use? These are the only concerns the target market for products in this price bracket have. Almost no one will be using a board like this with more than an i3 installed.
The HDV and B660M-HDV are the same price in Australia. The Soyo B660M classic is also $120 US, you got that wrong, it's just $20 more. Also the MSI B660M-E is much better as we will show soon.
@@Hardwareunboxed Thanks for the reply. Those were the prices I could find for the US and where I live. Still, that $20 makes all the difference in what features can be added (like VRM heatsinks for example). The letter suffix boards have always been cheap and nasty (HDV from ASRock, DSxx from Gigabyte etc). They are built to a price point not to features. I don't even know why you would bother reviewing one, it's not something anyone buys by choice, it's that purchase you make when you are dead broke and absolutely need a PC up and running. No one in that situation needs to be made to feel worse, one would imagine they know full well not to expect it to be the best board out there...
We're not disputing the price. Our issues is with the false marketing, something you as a consumer should also take issue with.
@@Hardwareunboxed I do, and that is on manufacturers, ASRock is far from the only one who's marketing material is skirting too close to falsehood. The simple fact is, if you are on a tight budget and need RAM overclocking, PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset and better USB support/implementation, the B660M HDV may well be your best and only option. $20 where I live is a lot of money to the middle/lower class, it's more than the weekly pension of many elderly here. On top of that, the Soyo would have to ship from China as it isn't stocked here. I hope you see what I am saying, reviews should point out flaws, for sure, but they should also address the use case and price point of the product and how well it serves the market it's targeted at. For someone using a Pentium/Celeron/i3 the HDV will do everything they need without issue. That is what people searching for a review on these kinds of product want to see, not that it's the worst board on the platform. Unless the board blew up, failed or was unstable under perfectly normal conditions, it does what it was designed to. ASRock is one of the only manufacturers that still caters to this end of the market and offers a bare bones, cheap option for those that need it. I still have a B360M HDV in a little box I built for my daughter for school running perfectly for years. With it's i5-9500T and an RX 570 it does everything she needs it to, plays all her games and has never given her a single issue. For most buying boards like this, that is all they need/want from it. Be careful your beef with ASRock does not color your reviews and negatively impact your viewer base is all I am saying. HUB has long been heralded as an honest, unbiased, hard hitting channel with all the benchmarks and data you could want, please stick to that formula, it's what I come here to see.
This is all a waste of time, I know for a fact that the MSI B660M-E is a significantly better product. Also call it for what it is, Asrock isn't " skirting too close to falsehood" they're neck deep in BS and for some reason you're doing your best to justify it.
My favorite part is the holes in the board for VRM heatsinks...for the 'higher end' SKU using this PCB. What'd they save, $5?
PC parts get reviewed by non company shills, so I find it incredible that companies still market substandard parts with misleading or just false advertising on purpose. As others have commented, putting out garbage reflects on a company's ENTIRE brand.
Corsair's stock case fans I have found to be decent, but I have upgraded every PC I've built (6 so far) to Noctua fans. I have also used Corsair PSU, AIO, ram and cases in every build. After 6 years, 2 of their AIO have died along with 1 ASUS X-99 MB and due to price, reviews and stock issues, I went with Arctic LFII 280 AIO and GSKILL 4x8 ram for X570 MB replacement AMD build. I suggested to my friend to replace his dead AIO (ours died at almost the same 6 year mark) with an air cooler as at the time no one had AIO in stock and an air cooler would be "good enough".
For me, Corsair has earned my brand loyalty, but they start purposely putting out substandard parts ON PURPOSE like ASROCK, well, lots of options out there.
Highlighting bad products like this one is just as important as highlighting the good ones. Perhaps even more important. Well done!
I have a project stalled because the only available solution (DDR4, B660, ITX) that doesn't cost a fortune is an Asrock board that looks to be every bit as bad as this one. Apparently there are alternatives from Biostar and Gigabyte but they're not actually available up here. And have yet to be reviewed (hint hint).
Like all great reviews you prompt questions. You said you had a fan blowing on the VRMs; I wonder how the board would have fared if you had added heatsinks to those VRMs? If you do go back to the board, perhaps you could test that? I also wonder how the board would fare when so modified and paired with a low-end CPU like a 12100 or 12400?
You can't really trust companies that also make NFTs after all...
Thanks for the heads up... Very few do this kind of content to warn people of crap products. People like you guys made the budget community feel they are present.
the -HDV series is one of the board ranges ASRock make for the MEA (Middle-East, Africa) region export market.
I'm in South Africa and Namibia, this 'thing' is on the shelves of practically every PC store and in so many pre-builts.
It sucks even worse here due to our higher ambient temperatures.
Piece of Junk
Asrock limiting power actually lowers your bloody pc temperature
Interesting... I purchased an Asrock board almost 10 years ago that they advertised could run an AMD FX8350 and it would throttle constantly. Like literally a few seconds after you loaded up the cpu it would drop to 1ghz. I got into a massive argument with their tech support and vowed to never buy any of their garbage again.
I've been looking forward to this a great deal, real information about motherboards is almost nonexistent and you do wonderful work.
Asrock out at it again
why you didnt test this board with i5 non k cpus,
you only test the high end only bro .. test it on lower cpus such as i3 or i5 non k, see the vrm
Oh boy, it is the B560M-HDV 2: Electric Boogaloo again.
I would love to see boot times if you do another roundup of old and new boards.
And thank you for warning people about these new and terrible models.
man I remember when ASRock was a top tier brand . my ASRock z77 extreme 4 still works to this date but bought a b550 steel legend and was very disappointed by it's price and performance
Same board here. Crazy high and stable OC on my 3570k.
@@GTTMRC95 Ikr? was pushing my 3570k to 4.3ghz with a cheap cooler master hyper 410r without any problem
From what I remember, the steel legend did not have any of the garbage vrm performance as shown here right? At most, it is just an medicore board which is overpriced for its tier right?
I didn't know Soyo is still around after 15 years...
This has been ASRock's way for as long as they have been in business. They are not going to change. They cater to the low end. MSI was the same when they were still called Micro-Star (frankly, I still view MSI as a bit "low end" because of previous experiences with Micro-Star, though I do currently use an MSI mobo). I agree with the advertising being misleading, thought its not technically false. There is a place for such boards. When I built my home theater PC I bought the cheapest mobo and cpu I could find. All it had to do was run a sound card and a video card. As long as it does its job and is reliable, it does not matter if it can run a monster chip at full performance.
Motherboards are expensive af. I can't believe a "budget" b660 can go up to $200. That's crazy
Intel people have $$$. AMD people are poor so we get $100 B550 mobos
yeah, especially 12th gen mobos. My ASRock Z590 Extreme costed as much as this b660 board, it's crazy
I just built a. Ryzen 5 3600 on an ASRock B550M-HDV and was pleasantly surprised with its performance. I didn’t expect much from this board because it was inexpensive. The bios was something I expected to see in a much more expensive board. It was definitely a wow factor. I did add a heatsink to the VRM’s because this board doesn’t have one. Coupling this board with a 65 Watt Ryzen 3600 does seem to be a good match. Trying to run too much power through this board is probably not a good idea. It’s a budget board and nothing more. Taking it past its limits will surely result in failure.
That's the sad thing, they have proven they can make budget stuff that isn't total garbage in the past, yet now they seem determined to
@@AshleyHinds Agreed, but look at the components he is coupling with this board. It’s way too much for the board to handle.
@@techluvin7691 they advertise the board as supporting all the K-SKU CPUs and while that power stage note is there, most people won't understand what that means, that it'll technically run the 125w K CPUs, but they'll be out of spec and heavily gimped.
It isn't completely unreasonable for someone to think this board should be ok for an i5 12600K cause it is a smaller CPU than the i7 or i9 and this is a B660 board not H610, but it'll still be too much for it.
They're basically pulling fine print disclaimer crap which is what Steve is pointing out.
@@AshleyHinds Yes, I’ll give him that, but anyone who buys this board isn’t coupling a high end cpu with it……..or at least shouldn’t be. Yes, without a doubt, ASRock should remove the high end CPU support from documentation or at the very least add a disclaimer to the CPU’s that will throttle on this board. In general, when paired with a lower to mid range cpu (ie R5-3600), it’s a decent board with an outstanding bios. Hardware Unboxed should have mentioned this rather then just crapping on the board. That’s my main issue with some of these tech shows. They use hardware that only a small percentage of the population can afford. The need to review more affordable components and not couple a high end cpu and 3080 with a budget board. It is a decent board when coupled with complimentary components and even better when you add heatsinks to the VRM’s. I have DDR 3200 MHz ram overclocked to run at 3600 MHz on this board without issue.
@@techluvin7691 Firstly, did you even watch the whole video?
They tested it with a 12400 and proved it was fine in the sane CPU match scenario.
The whole issue is their basically false advertising to say it could support the bigger die CPUs just because they technically turn on in the mobo without crashing cause they're throttled to hell, everything 10600K and above with the larger dies including the E cores is a fail (including the non-K "65w" CPUs which also failed)
Steve literally said if they advertised it to support only the i5 12400 tops (largest non E core CPU is technically the non-K 12600, but it and the 12500 are just a 12400 with a slight frequency bump) it would be fine as a product, not great but fine because no deception.
The deception is the anti-consumer point of the video - if they didn't advertise it as supporting up to the 12900K this video wouldn't have happened
Looks like something you find in a christmas cracker.
Steve starting 2022 by asking Asrock to re-blacklist them for the year by pointing out the truth
I never imagined that a motherboard could have such a significant impact on performance. I can't believe the power delivery is so bad. How can you do a thing like this and call it anything but a reputation stain? Kudos for you to exposing it.
This was eye opening for me. I had no idea that there were products on the market like this.
I was contemplating my first Asrock MB purchase (This board actually) for a more budget build. After seeing this I plan to avoid the brand altogether. I am sure they make some good products but I do not want to have to wade thru a minefield of bad ones (Hopefully finding a video to point them out but not always the case) . I would rather buy from a trusted brand paying a little more knowing they just work and there will be no issues. Thanks Steve.
Defining a trusted brand is in itself difficult in this arena. They have all produced shockers. You are still better going by reviews for individual products rather than just trusting a brands entire range. This goes for most components I've found. In recent times it does seem that Asus is on average producing the best motherboards (but there are stil some not so good ones), gigabyte is suffering some quality issues in this area (and I'm a very long time gigabyte fan so that hurts me to say so) and MSI motherboards in the last few years have done amazing things to drag their reputation out of the fire pit (which is where historically most of their products ended up...I say ended up...they usually cased the fires.....). As bad as this review is, there are still plenty of decent Asrock boards out there, but things like this do sully their reputation and I can understand that if there is an Asrock board and a similarly priced competitor of similar quality, people are likely to be swayed to the competitor.
@@malphadour ASUS is usually okay, but you likely pay more than similar equipped boards. MSI seems like a decent brand in the lower product range in terms of price/featureset if you ask me. Gigabyte is usually horrible when it comes to having to do firmware updates on anything they produce 🙄 I wouldn't recommend unless you never intend to update firmware of their products (even their online guides don't align with the actual products either).
Great Video Steve!! But all I was thinking of the whole time was Samuel L Jackson saying.. "Say What again Mfer! Say WATT again!" 🤣
🤣 When you get compared to Soyo (eBay special?) and get smoked it's time to have a long hard look in the mirror and ask if motherboard manufacturing is for you. 🤣
This is a next level burn from Steve and I love it.
Asrock was my favourite motherboard choices during the AMD B450 time. But now I am going back to Gigabyte and MSI.
lmao it's like comparing a cheap corolla and lexus sport car. You could tell from the price alone. Imagine people who could only afford this board buying high end 12th gen
After using Asus and the odd Asrock for years, I'm trying my first ever MSI board - B660M WiFi DD4. Very impressed so far.
Buildzoid from Actually Hardcore Overclocking (also blacklisted by ASRock) gave that board a really good review.
Asrock is running away... Down the slope, and not looking back...
B660M hdv can only maxed 65W, only for I5 nonK and I3 even though bfb can pass 95W i dont think without VRM heatsink it will stable... they should change their spec list that this board can run 125W... You should also test all cheapest board across all brands. Easiest choose motherboard now is see the VRM heatsink, mofset, and powerphase. All manufacturer making crappy board including last gen MSI B560M-A, asus prime, gigabyte ds3h...
So the "HDV" stands for "Hot Damn VRM"?
remember when the worst x570 board was because it got hot and needed more cooling? and now the worst is its hot, and cant run the CPUs at all without settings and cooling directly on the VRM. feels real bad, real real bad. motherboard companies need to be held to a higher standard, these arent OEM prebuilds for offices that will never see a compile or game, these are builder boards and corners need to stop being cut. there is a min spec they need to hit.
I'm starting to wonder if the company name "Asrock" stands for:
"Awful Shit Reeks Of Crap 'Kay?"
Hardware Unboxed doing God's work! Bar none #1 hardware review TH-camr in this category of reviews!
not really this board has its market is for cheap Pentium and Celeron and this guy its just exploiting the board for TH-cam views , he could easy make a video about the Asrock B560 or B660 and say : hey this board is too week to go anything more power hungry that i3 don't use this with a i5 , i7 or oblivious the i9
For $80 usd as of writing this board is really good for its' capabilities. It can technically adequately power a 12600 non k and lower with no issues whatsoever as long as you can keep the board itself cool. pcie 4 for both gfx and the main m2 slot and the 2nd m2 slot can be used for wifi/bluetooth cards and it comes with intel lan over realtek garbage and it supports 13th gen stuff. For $80 usd I see nothing wrong with this board as long as it functions properly. These boards shouldn't be judged on their K series chip performance...ever. Z series is for K series chips and B series boards shouldn't even be in the same discussion. as for the 12700 non k, do your research on the boards power limits when buying severely budget boards. it comes with the territory unfortunately. companies are required to support all parts, but not at full capabilities which is why they advertise things such as power limits and power phases etc.
Some colorful mobo with h610m is selling for $60 tho
They should add all over their site: "For critical information, please excavate it from annotations, head paragraphs and footnotes scattered around our various Support sections." (Maybe add a trailing asterix with no matching footnote to be found just for appropriate style...)
Just cancelled an order for this exact board on Newegg a few days ago. It is still backordered over there so they are going to sell. If all you want to run is a 12100 or 12400 cheap as possible, this is as inexpensive as it gets (~$95USD at the time of this posting) for B660M support but you're absolutely right. The advertising is misleading at best...outright lying at worst.
man i wish i could get it for 95 usd, i paid 130 in my country. still was the cheapest by about 30 dollars and there wereore expensive h610m boards.
i got this board a month back because i was on a super budget so i literally picked the cheapest one, woulda had to pay around 35% more for a decent board (like the msi -a variant)
not happy to buy asrock as i very well know its garbage, my old h170m-pro4 sure was, but it works and saved me money, so 🤷♂️
i have to mention though, i paired it with a 12400f, so it really doesn't gimp my performance in any way.
I was about to ask that, im having this board with 12400f and 3060ti. No plan for oc but wondering how much it impacts with this specs🤔
I have this motherboard and my specs are 12th Gen Intel i5-12400F, RTX 3060 TI 32GB of ddr4 ram and i have no complaints games run smoothly with zero issues
Is your computer still safe now? I plan to use this motherboard and an i5 12400f
Kudos to Steve for attempting to trying to assist this product into achieving its claims by providing additional help in cooling and actually completing the workloads when obviously it wasn’t going to pass. It would have been very easy to call it a day after 10 minutes into the testing. I have always given Asrock a hard pass and will continue to do so in the future until I am shown they can show a legitimate ‘good’ product at a competitive price.
The funny thing is that 10 years ago ASRock was the brand that was forcing the price of good mid-tier boards down. Back then their boards were feature wise on par with the other big three but they just did a minimum of decoration and pointless fandangling in return for really good pricing.
I have asrock's B350-HDV. It's cheap, it's bad, it was the only mobo I could find when Ryzen launched. Never gave me any troubles somehow.
Yes thanks for testing every cpu that no one buys this board for.
How in the world is Asrock managed to get even worse than Soyo?!
HDV : Highly Deceptive Value
VRM heatsink sold separate as NFT
Would like to see some reviews of the itx boards. ASRock B660M-ITX/ac is the only moderately affordable itx boards in my area, wonder if a 12400f can work fine on it.
And I remember ASRock AM4 boards being decent (not great but still decent), are they trying to keep the same profit margin/price while Intel is charging them more for the chipset? Or Intel processors are just much more demanding on the vrm?
That's a 65W to 117W part. That would be hard to drive full tilt with any motherboard. AMD is soo much easier to power
I love how you're blacklisted, yet still here exposing bad products from bad companies. And here I am being saved from choosing a bad motherboard for my nephews build! TY for you work guys love the channel.
You are missing the point of this board.
The board was not designed for mid to high end cpu.
It was for i3 12100f. Which the variable you missed.
this is nowhere in the product page to be found
or i3s in general it's for the low of mid end cpu
Given that all intel 600 series boards are very expensive compared to AMD (this board is 110 euro here, while perfectly fine b550 boards start at 60 euro) i can totally see people getting the cheapest b660 board (which are the lowest spec ones without memory speed limits) they can for any intel CPU and then getting subpar performance.
This is so crazy, the X370 Taichi on AMD's side was one the best VRM's of all time, that thing is 5 years old and will OC a 5950X without throttling a single % of performance, yet a brand new mobo in 2022 gets worse performance in its branch than a 5 y.o flagship? I think the main reason for this dissapointment has to be the rough times Taiwan is currently going under, things are getting out of hand in the real world and just like the 8th gen consoles being designed under an economic crisis made them trash, im sure the current situation in Taiwan is affecting all brands, albeit, unequally, Asrock never had the capital to take as much pain as Asus or Gigabyte.
They also charge a premium for Taichi boards. The problem here is that budget buyers are going to get stung badly. If you're already talking $700 CPUs and $500 motherboards it's not the end of the world if you get a dud. You'll order another (grumpily) and start the RMA process. People who buy these $90 boards are typically stacking their pennies, so they'll be stuck without a working computer if they return the board and have to wait for the gods to decide.
I can already hear the MSI engineers laughing hard at Asrock's recommendation for this board :)
Asrock really out on a streak
The fact that it can't even handle 65w without direct air flow is ridiculous.
Hey Steve what do you think about the Asus TUF B660 boards and do you plan to compare various B660 and B660M boards soon?
Yeah, we will do video soon on b660 tierlist
Actually this motherboard should work perfectly for anyone using the stock cooler. Its very impressive my i3 would instantly go to 100c at like 2ghz under load. So anyone planning on using the stock cooler will have no issues with this board.
Just never upgrade. Horrible value in that sense given there are alternatives that can support high end CPUs.
I dont agree that boards like these have no purpose in the market. If you were to look for a cheap board to run a i5-12400f with box cooler, this'd be the cheapest option.
It'd have a place, if they were just honest about their spec. That said, if the cost to them to improve this to meet the spec of the entire lineup are insignificant, you can make the argument that this is more e-waste than a viable product. You can even see the holes for the heatsinks are in the board, it can't cost much to put some pieces of aluminium on it and increase the TDP spec...
Can you keep us updated on Bios revisions of the MSI board that was sitting at 103 degrees? I'm wondering if they are launching the boards with agressive power profiles for reviews and then cut performance to bring down thermals in later bios releases.
This board probably is best paired with an i3-12100 for those on a super tight budget, but then you have no upgrade path since higher end CPUs are gimped with the board.
Man haven’t held a Soyo motherboard since the 90s, always good quality and affordable. I built and repaired hundreds and hundreds of white box PCs using Soyo boards back in the day.