I'm not sure of the general meaning of the term myself. But per the speaker himself, '... direct airflow configuration, which includes an additional 120mm fan covering the VRM.'
i have to say though, this is some incredible effort! 9 boards ran across 12 tests each lasting an hour + the pc rebuild time, you truly are the best benchmarking channel out there
I would have avoided giving the Asrock Board such a clean B-roll, probably a mugshot style thing with a massive red Cross on it for Asrock to get the message 🤣🤣
I would have filmed it in a dumpster and on fire so you don't accidentally use it somewhere down the line. The only board even worth considering is the MSI Pro A in this roundup, hopefully round 2 fares better
Very impressive results from the Maxsun and Soyo boards! Kinda put some of the established brands to shame. I would be tempted to try these if it wasn't for the potential support/warranty limitations.
They have been solid brands (in terms of products) for quite some time now, good to know they are starting to get some recognition (you wont buy them anyway, they are not really sold anywhere west)
as a legacy pc builder, my customers(relatives) refuse to upgrade and I have to source fm2+ motherboards from China, maxsun and soyo fm2+ motherboards work seamlessly
as u said, "potential support/warranty limitations". I imagine this is the exact reason why they can sell for lower. Setting up global distribution, support and warranty should cost a lot too.
Got the MSI PRO B660M-A, paired with a 12600K just yesterday. And I'm so glad to see this video. 🤩 Thank you so much Steve for all your hardwork! Cheers!
I have to say - I think I'm more excited about motherboards tests than cpu tests. It's true especially for these budget solutions. I mean cpu/gpu tests are ubiquitous, but good, confirmed boards comparisons are a rarity, but it can affect cpu performance in a substantial way.
Thank you for the hard work Steve. This is exactly what I was waiting for. It is amazing the amount of variance in performance between boards priced so closely.
i think this is just the right amount of focus. for people who have the budget to buy b660, it means we'll usually run i7's at most and an i9 if it's cheap later. as a result, designing a board to just BARELY run the i9 without throttling is ideal since the rest of the limited budget can be spent on features.
You find this content fascinating. On a personal level, I'm more interested in laptops, but I'd be lying if I claimed to have no interest in this content.
Though I don't personally need this exact content, this kind of motherboard mega comparison can be hugely useful and I'm glad this content is being made! I did build out a Alder Lake ITX build recently for a friend, hoping the ASRock Z690 ITX board is at least a bit better than their B660 offering....
Can't explain how much gratitude I have for you mannn.. Great work ...Vrm are so much important ... Most people just don't understand this...Thx for this comparison .. You just earned a subscriber
You're ignoring the maxsun and soyo boards as they are the best performers in both performance and temperature but yeah they are Chinese products so it doesn't surprise me that you're ignoring them
@@rdmz135 Yeah but they were pretty close when you look at the graphs as there were multiple instances where the Chinese motherboards outperformed the msi boards and the msi boards are more likely to be sold at a much higher price while it's common for Chinese boards are generally cheaper but like I said the msi board is more preferable as it's a more trustworthy company and would provide bios support for a long time and have a warranty which I would not expect from the Chinese boards.
brands don't really like to sample or focus marketing on low end boards especially since they know that some of there products there are either bad or underwhelm and are mostly just there to have a presence in that market segment and/or are mostly sold to SI. Good on Steave to give budget buyers an insight on what they can expect at the low end.
Not surprisingly MSI seems to have learned their lesson. (VRM performance issues from about 2 years ago) I have been VERY happy with my latest MSI boards and I hope the trend continues. Great quality boards from them lately.
can't thank you enough for making these comparison videos. I was in the process of upgrading my current build and was desperate for someone to let me know which motherboard is the best considering the limited options and budget I had. This and all other b660 videos gave me a perfect guide to choose my motherboard which is the msi pro b660m-a ddr4. Hopefully it dosen't disappoint me.
Impressive review, good job! I'm just in the process of ordering parts for my new PC....and thanks to your review I changed my motherboard order to MSI Pro B660M-A (from Gigabyte B660M DS3H).
Damn this is an insane difference between these boards! I wouldn't have thought this would ever happen lol, I've always had this in my mind that "any board can run anything stock with no problems" but turns out it's a wild difference with boards even in the same price range. The MSI Pro looks like a great candidate for an upcoming build, I just wish it had +1 M.2 slot like many other 12th gen boards do. I highly appreciate motherboard comparisons like this, I'm really looking forward to the next!
15:42 What the heck? 122° C? I wonder what the hell Asrock did to the Pro lineup. The B560 Pro4 was one of the best budget LGA1200 motherboards just a few months ago (really good price, decent VRMs and feature set) but they went backwards now
Wow, outstanding testing. So helpful and interesting results. I'm disappointed to see top brands come in below budget brands... I know you tested them rigorously and most users won't put them through these paces on a regular basis, nice job MSI!
Quality video as always, but considering the prices of these 10 boards maybe there could have been some results with a 12400/12100 and less with the 12900?
gotta love that the first Asrock board is down the trash can was that a OLD PCI slot on the Gigagbyte B660M D3H? seems you skipped over that? it's kinda ODD that "cheapo" brands like SOYO performs way better than the "high quality" or should we just call em "high price" brands from now on?
SOYO MOBO, I use to buy soyo in the early 2000's to build my kids computers, Microcenter carried them.. but they dont anymore. Now the only soyo thing i have is a monitor. thanks for all the tons of time put into this video..
MSI did a great job, but there are several great B660 boards for cheap. Really great showing for these budget boards, except for Asrock's cheapest board.
I was looking for a decent and affordable B660 or H670 board. Suffice to say I gave up and just got a 5600x + B550 combo and couldn't be happier. The crazy part is it would have cost me more to go with the cheapest B660 and a 12100f.
First of all I really aprecciate the work you guys putting in to these reviews. My question is how switching to an air cooler would affect the VRM temperatures. Since this is the setup i imagine most people will go for. Also testing these boards with an i5 12400 would have been very interesting.
He mentioned in the video almost all of these would work fine paired with a 12400. I would think using an air cooler would lower the temps slightly but also how many people use such a solid air flow case as what was used in the video
@@johntotten4872 Well yeah since the 12400 draws roughly 2/3 of the power than the 12700 does (with no power limit). Not so sure about the air cooler. The air which flows over the VRMs is definetly hotter than compared to the setup used in the video.
Air coolers don't all have downdraft for the vrm's, given the high power draw during turbo, most people would pair these with a budget tower cooler which would have minimal air directed at vrm's.
I would have loved to see numbers for the 12100 and 12400, which are probably the most likely pairings for entry level B660 boards. Given how bad some of these boards were, it wouldn't shock me if they couldn't even handle a 12400 with unlocked power levels.
I see your persistence has finally beaten MSI into submission, no more cheap crappy motherboards. As an unfortunate purchaser of an X570-pro A I appreciate the effort, pity I didn't check out your reviews back then!
Thx for this I love maxsun for $95,but gigabyte's rear I/o is plentiful for the $120 asking price..i think 125w 12600/12700k is still decent for that board
An H610 VRM testing for i3 12100 and i5 12400 and maybe 12600K would be interesting as I think especially for these CPUs most H610 boards are plenty enough.
Very good job. I would say that Alder Lake & B660 combo raises the due diligence level for the average user when building a new system with these parts. But thanks to you and your work here, we are now aware of the possible issues. Thumbs-up!
Man you do the best reviews... even way back in your channels life, you two were awesome. It seems like 15 years back you started your channel. 🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼🍀🍀🍀😎🤓 Sheeet I subscribed 7 years ago! Great work!
Hi Steve, if you read this, I think have the temperature bar red is fitting, intuitive and provides more visual contrast for comparing CB score to temperatures, thanks for the good work!
I want you to test the 12400 and 12100 with out extra fan on the VRMs, with and without power limits, to see how well they really do handle those CPU's .... the gigabytes especially as they are the most easy models to acquire world wide in most places...
Great review! Awesome work. You helped me allot with this. But I think if you would use air cpu cooler, specially with double fan support, the vrm temps will be much lower then water cooled. Would be nice if you just try it with a couple boards if this indeed helps.
Soyo boards are still around? They were quite common in late 90's Poland, I myself got Celeron 466MHz with Soyo board in 1999, and I loved their designs as everything was fairly well placed and they retained an ISA slot for much longer than other brands. They kind of disappeared in early 2000's some time after the Socket A became the king , I remember they had a board called Dragon or something, but the price and availability wasn't too good and it might not been a top performer either so it was hard to justify the purchase. I remember going Shuttle at that time due to similar design and 5/6 PCI slots, I think AK31 and AK35GT2R for my Thunderbird and Palomino, after which Shuttle disappeared and I had a nightmare with Asus boards until I found out how rock stable Gigabyte boards became around P35 era.
For the future videos it would be nice if some of the text was visually supported on the screen, even holding a box of a product would help. After watching two videos back to back about motherboards my ears are spinning and head is dizzy, most of the speaking part are just rows of numbers, dash's and letters. Really hard to follow, especially if the products are unknown for the viewer. Otherwise thumbs up form me, very useful stuff.
Coming in very late to this video, since I'm now trying to help a friend with a potential new PC build. This is the wild wild west in terms of power limits and potential throttling and temperature and performance. Gotta appreciate the effort in testing and showing all this. With the recent debacle about 14th gen stability and Intel introducing new "baseline" and "default" profiles for the BIOS, this doesn't give me any confidence at all. Cheers for the work :)
My workplace is upgrading my work system and are using the Asus Prime B660M-A D4-CSM, which seems to be the same as the -A D4 in this video, minus one of the VRM heatsinks. It'll be running a 12700F, which seems like will work fine with the VRM solution. I'm nearly certain they will be using the stock cooler with that CPU, so we'll see how that goes. Thank goodness for you making this video, and allowing me to rest easy that my employer hasn't selected a trash mobo for my new machine.
A very useful comparison and gives a stark contrast in the quality available, even at similar price points. One thing I would be interested to know is whether there's any variance in system power use between the boards. Is the excess heat just because of inadequate cooling capability, or is more power being turned to heat due to less power efficiency?
Almost only mATX mainboards...why? And there are so many more mainboard boxes on the table than are shown in the benchmarks :(. I was hoping to see boards like the ASUS Prime B660 Plus, ASUS B660 TUF Plus, MSI B660M Mortar, MSI B660 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B660 Gaming X, and so on. Yes, those are not super-budget, but they are the important ones for PC builders who don't need any Z690 boards - which are most of them, if we are honest, since CPU overclocking with normal means is almost dead by now.
I wonder how much better DS3H would compete if Gigabyte would replace this M.2 heatsink with second VRM heatsink. It's budget board so no one will place top end 4.0 drive in there right away, and slower drives don't really need heatsinks. And if someone really wants to upgrade to 4.0 SSD later they can get one with heatsink or they can even buy very cheap heatsink.
Small bump for any B660 board featuring the dual position mounting holes, as affordable socket 1700 compatible coolers can still be a bit scarce when over the counter shopping.
Wow. I didn't realise there was such a huge difference in performance and temp with same class mobos. MSI is impressive. Surprised about Asus and Gigabyte. Those were usually my go-to boards.
the performance is 100% predictable from the specs of the boards. The GIgabyte DS3h, D3H and Gaming (and D2h) are the same crappy board with different minor spec details. The Gigabyte Power is their version of the HDV (even worse). The Gigabyte Aorus Pro is similar to MSI's Pro A. MSI's crappier boards are the Pro E, Bomber, Pro G, Pro B. All those MSI boards would perform badly because they have no vrm heatsink. The difference is that if you are not careful when you are shopping you might not realize that the MSI Pro B660M-E is one of the worst B660 boards you can buy and basically a scam with the M.2 slot not even delivering the performance of the chipset, only 1 fan header, only 2 RAM slots, naked VRMs, and just overall a horrible board, whereas the MSI Pro B660M-A is a very nice board, but the names are almost identical.
I am sure Msi Australia are great guys...but msi has done terrible things in the past, just like the others yes. Although i must put evga above the rest. And by the way...i have an msi z490 a-pro @@Hardwareunboxed
I was waiting for this video for long to upgrade to alder lake. However, I just purchased the MSI B660M-A Wifi as I needed Wifi and the VRMs looked like they could handle a 12700. This video only made me happy for my decision. Thanks
I highly recommand checking out the maxsun terminater B660M, it has same vram performance but much better peripheral support and slots on the board for what i think the identical price.
I’m not in the market for a full sized board but still watched through the whole video. The amount of work put into this is insane. Also, am I reading this right, the ASRock HDV can’t even run the 12900K properly at PL1=65W? Anandtech reviewed a NUC Compute Element card with a 12900 (PL1=65W) and it yielded an R23 score of almost 18000.
A lot of work there. Thank you. I'm looking forward to your ITX roundup. Here up over the MSI B660M-A is £162 on Amazon (cheaper if you're willing to wait a month) which begs the question: is it worth spending £18 extra to get the MSI Mortar for £180? Something for a follow-up video, perhaps? Those Chinese boards are superficially impressive so perhaps you might do a deeper dive to look at the companies and their ranges of products?
I too would like to look at the other products from those Chinese manufacturers as they are literally the best performers in Steve's data and it sure is kinda superficial given the price.
both of them are grossly overpriced, you can buy the B660M-A for £130 from technextday in stock. £180 is far too much for the Mortar you'd best look at Z690 for that money.
Looking forward to seeing the TUF and MORTAR results :) To few people show how the boards behave with the non-K SKU's, I'm looking for a B660 MATX for a 12700 non-K right now :)
Be sure to update your BIOS when you get these boards. Multiple brands have had very bad performance issues with certain chips on their stock bios. The Gigabyte D3H in particular misbehaves BADLY with locked i5 chips on the launch bios. As always, run some benchmarks and compare them to what that chip should be capable of
Back in my days (lol) any board could run a compatible CPU at stock frequency. High-end motherboards were needed for overclocking. It makes the choice a lot more complex so thank you for these comparison videos.
Hm... I'm looking at Asus Prime B660M-A D4 in EU region and the picture on the board does NOT feature a top heatsink! Your version is Asus Prime B660M-A D4 WIFI, which seems to have an additional heatskink besides the WIFI feature. Either that, or there is some dodgy regional difference between models.
Greatly appreciate the data on budgeted products. I look forward to the next dataset on more expensive, but still budgeted, motherboards. It's honestly a shame you even have to bother collecting such data. Hopefully this eventually pushes motherboard manufacturers to increase the quality of their lower end products.
Msi, Gigabyte, and Asus are really the only big company that makes the best mobo I thinks. While the 2 that are not popular really stand out from this video. Nice work.
Have you been able to check which boards have a BCLK overclocking ability for locked SKUs? I know the Asus B660 Strix can OC the 12400 to 5GHz+ for example.
Part 2 is now available, covering 18 boards in total: th-cam.com/video/PEa0vcJ0lRY/w-d-xo.html
what doesnt mean direct and standart air flow ? direct its u put additional fan on vrm radiotor or what ?
what does direct airflow mean pls explain
I'm not sure of the general meaning of the term myself. But per the speaker himself, '... direct airflow configuration, which includes an additional 120mm fan covering the VRM.'
@@dothackjhe any idea how t mount a 120mm fan for vrm
@@aravindraja8034 That will probably depend on the layout of your build. I think, you will just have to improvise on it, mainly.
Great to see someone still doing big comparisons. Thank you, Steve.
steve is just great!
i have to say though, this is some incredible effort! 9 boards ran across 12 tests each lasting an hour + the pc rebuild time, you truly are the best benchmarking channel out there
I would have avoided giving the Asrock Board such a clean B-roll, probably a mugshot style thing with a massive red Cross on it for Asrock to get the message 🤣🤣
With a fart sound effect
He's not Gamers Nexus...
I would have filmed it in a dumpster and on fire so you don't accidentally use it somewhere down the line. The only board even worth considering is the MSI Pro A in this roundup, hopefully round 2 fares better
Is gigabyte 660 ds3h good choice for i5 12400 or should I go for msi mag b660?
@@rmmbitfountain3922 msi b660 m a
Woo! Steve at it again with the mega comparison! These comparisons are truly appreciated.
the work load to make all those benchmarks must have taken weeks
I hope he test them with I5 12400f.
@@NamTran-xc2ip any and all boards are going to work with the 12400F, it uses about 70w.
Very impressive results from the Maxsun and Soyo boards! Kinda put some of the established brands to shame. I would be tempted to try these if it wasn't for the potential support/warranty limitations.
They have been solid brands (in terms of products) for quite some time now, good to know they are starting to get some recognition (you wont buy them anyway, they are not really sold anywhere west)
@@HelloOnepiece Except, Aliexpress is a thing. I mean they do deliver to the west, east, south or north.
Kinda order one, the legacy cpu cooler suport is what i need
as a legacy pc builder, my customers(relatives) refuse to upgrade and I have to source fm2+ motherboards from China, maxsun and soyo fm2+ motherboards work seamlessly
as u said, "potential support/warranty limitations". I imagine this is the exact reason why they can sell for lower. Setting up global distribution, support and warranty should cost a lot too.
Got the MSI PRO B660M-A, paired with a 12600K just yesterday. And I'm so glad to see this video. 🤩
Thank you so much Steve for all your hardwork!
Cheers!
Thank God you made a right choice!
10 cores was more than enough for my needs. The 12700 would've been overkill for me even in the long run.
Am i missing something but why 12600k with a b660 and not z690?
@@GabrielKLKN why not, you still can do base clock overclocking which most people won’t do anyway
@@GabrielKLKN z690 is overkill anyway
I have to say - I think I'm more excited about motherboards tests than cpu tests. It's true especially for these budget solutions. I mean cpu/gpu tests are ubiquitous, but good, confirmed boards comparisons are a rarity, but it can affect cpu performance in a substantial way.
These comparison videos are always extremely appreciated, they're very informative. Thanks Steve!!
Thank you for the hard work Steve. This is exactly what I was waiting for. It is amazing the amount of variance in performance between boards priced so closely.
Kudos for the MSI for focusing on VRM quality.
I believe B560M Pro VDH is in their B560 round up.
It's because the "MSI Pro B660M-A" is MSI's only for less than 150,- AUS/US(?)-$.
Ah never mind. He reviewed the VDH WIFI as well. Sorry for the confusion! ^_^
MSI likes its VRMs
i think this is just the right amount of focus. for people who have the budget to buy b660, it means we'll usually run i7's at most and an i9 if it's cheap later. as a result, designing a board to just BARELY run the i9 without throttling is ideal since the rest of the limited budget can be spent on features.
I don't know why even though I have decided and purchased all the components for my PC already, I just can't stop watching these videos
You find this content fascinating.
On a personal level, I'm more interested in laptops, but I'd be lying if I claimed to have no interest in this content.
Though I don't personally need this exact content, this kind of motherboard mega comparison can be hugely useful and I'm glad this content is being made! I did build out a Alder Lake ITX build recently for a friend, hoping the ASRock Z690 ITX board is at least a bit better than their B660 offering....
You're probably asking too much from ASRock...
Just make sure to get some airflow on that VRM and don't ride the CPU too hard.
Thank you for the testing! I really love seeing these kinds of comparisons of the more affordable boards.
Can't explain how much gratitude I have for you mannn.. Great work ...Vrm are so much important ... Most people just don't understand this...Thx for this comparison .. You just earned a subscriber
Aside from the MSI, all other mobos look very underwhelming. The cost of the chipset + PCIe4 must be high.
You're ignoring the maxsun and soyo boards as they are the best performers in both performance and temperature but yeah they are Chinese products so it doesn't surprise me that you're ignoring them
Looks like your typical budget motherboard to me. You want he bells and whistles you go for the Z690
@@nayan.punekar they are second to the MSI B660m-a. Still very good boards.
agree, b560 had much better boards eg b560m pro vdh
@@rdmz135 Yeah but they were pretty close when you look at the graphs as there were multiple instances where the Chinese motherboards outperformed the msi boards and the msi boards are more likely to be sold at a much higher price while it's common for Chinese boards are generally cheaper but like I said the msi board is more preferable as it's a more trustworthy company and would provide bios support for a long time and have a warranty which I would not expect from the Chinese boards.
brands don't really like to sample or focus marketing on low end boards especially since they know that some of there products there are either bad or underwhelm and are mostly just there to have a presence in that market segment and/or are mostly sold to SI. Good on Steave to give budget buyers an insight on what they can expect at the low end.
Well, ASRock have missed the mark yet again...
But hey, it is great to see Chinese-branded motherboards in your VRM review! ^_^
isnt asrock a spinoff of asus back then?
@@grozaphy Yes.
wait for b660 steel legend.
Luckily, based from how its VRM look like, I am sure it will perform better, as well as its mATX sibling.
@@mat-mat101 and hopefully bclk oc :)
Not surprisingly MSI seems to have learned their lesson. (VRM performance issues from about 2 years ago) I have been VERY happy with my latest MSI boards and I hope the trend continues. Great quality boards from them lately.
can't thank you enough for making these comparison videos. I was in the process of upgrading my current build and was desperate for someone to let me know which motherboard is the best considering the limited options and budget I had. This and all other b660 videos gave me a perfect guide to choose my motherboard which is the msi pro b660m-a ddr4. Hopefully it dosen't disappoint me.
Impressive review, good job! I'm just in the process of ordering parts for my new PC....and thanks to your review I changed my motherboard order to MSI Pro B660M-A (from Gigabyte B660M DS3H).
MSI has been on a roll with quality budget boards since their B450 releases and good to know that its also trickled down with current Intel boards.
You forgot the X570 debacle.
@@naamadossantossilva4736 yeah MSI has always been hit or miss..
@@naamadossantossilva4736 please elaborate
@@pietrmuffei8874 The first batch of X570 mobos MSI made were a dumpster fire.
th-cam.com/video/UZWUOldsxXQ/w-d-xo.html
Damn this is an insane difference between these boards! I wouldn't have thought this would ever happen lol, I've always had this in my mind that "any board can run anything stock with no problems" but turns out it's a wild difference with boards even in the same price range. The MSI Pro looks like a great candidate for an upcoming build, I just wish it had +1 M.2 slot like many other 12th gen boards do. I highly appreciate motherboard comparisons like this, I'm really looking forward to the next!
I'm waiting for this for Ages, thanks Steve...!!!
RIP Assrock
ASROCK NEVER DIE
🤣🤣🤣
they have spirits
Asrock driver support is better than asus
15:42
What the heck? 122° C? I wonder what the hell Asrock did to the Pro lineup. The B560 Pro4 was one of the best budget LGA1200 motherboards just a few months ago (really good price, decent VRMs and feature set) but they went backwards now
Wow, outstanding testing. So helpful and interesting results. I'm disappointed to see top brands come in below budget brands... I know you tested them rigorously and most users won't put them through these paces on a regular basis, nice job MSI!
This guy is a benchmarking beast, huge respect 👍.
money plus time
Quality video as always, but considering the prices of these 10 boards maybe there could have been some results with a 12400/12100 and less with the 12900?
i really agree with you but Steve did mention that any of these boards will do good with the 12400 cause it only uses like 70W
bro use gigabyte ds3h for 12400
This is a very underated review in terms of the information it provides, kudos to you guys!
The smoke reference explains what kind of motherboard Assrock has manufactured 😤
gotta love that the first Asrock board is down the trash can
was that a OLD PCI slot on the Gigagbyte B660M D3H? seems you skipped over that?
it's kinda ODD that "cheapo" brands like SOYO performs way better than the "high quality" or should we just call em "high price" brands from now on?
I only see truth in your comment.
SOYO MOBO, I use to buy soyo in the early 2000's to build my kids computers, Microcenter carried them.. but they dont anymore. Now the only soyo thing i have is a monitor. thanks for all the tons of time put into this video..
These motherboard tests are awesome, no one else is doing anything like it.
MSI Pro is only £20 more than the Gigabyte boards, well worth it!
MSI did a great job, but there are several great B660 boards for cheap. Really great showing for these budget boards, except for Asrock's cheapest board.
I was looking for a decent and affordable B660 or H670 board. Suffice to say I gave up and just got a 5600x + B550 combo and couldn't be happier. The crazy part is it would have cost me more to go with the cheapest B660 and a 12100f.
Yes alder lake platform makes no sense anymore after Ryzens got the big discounts a week ago.
I cannot wait for the testing of the Asus TUF GAMING B660M-Plus Wifi D4. It seems promising!
First of all I really aprecciate the work you guys putting in to these reviews. My question is how switching to an air cooler would affect the VRM temperatures. Since this is the setup i imagine most people will go for. Also testing these boards with an i5 12400 would have been very interesting.
He mentioned in the video almost all of these would work fine paired with a 12400. I would think using an air cooler would lower the temps slightly but also how many people use such a solid air flow case as what was used in the video
@@johntotten4872 Well yeah since the 12400 draws roughly 2/3 of the power than the 12700 does (with no power limit). Not so sure about the air cooler. The air which flows over the VRMs is definetly hotter than compared to the setup used in the video.
Air coolers don't all have downdraft for the vrm's, given the high power draw during turbo, most people would pair these with a budget tower cooler which would have minimal air directed at vrm's.
I would have loved to see numbers for the 12100 and 12400, which are probably the most likely pairings for entry level B660 boards. Given how bad some of these boards were, it wouldn't shock me if they couldn't even handle a 12400 with unlocked power levels.
My MSI PRO B660M can easily handle my i5-12600K 🤗
All would handle it just fine except for the ASRock HDV piece of trash
@@damara2268AssRock
Once again proving that MSI is a great manufacturer when it comes to motherboards (at least recently with B550, B560, and B660)
I see your persistence has finally beaten MSI into submission, no more cheap crappy motherboards.
As an unfortunate purchaser of an X570-pro A I appreciate the effort, pity I didn't check out your reviews back then!
It's really pity because I think last year they released a refreshed x570 series of mobo with an 'S' on their name that seem to have fixed the issues
Thx for this
I love maxsun for $95,but gigabyte's rear I/o is plentiful for the $120 asking price..i think 125w 12600/12700k is still decent for that board
i can't believe i watched this for free
An H610 VRM testing for i3 12100 and i5 12400 and maybe 12600K would be interesting as I think especially for these CPUs most H610 boards are plenty enough.
Curious about that
Very good job. I would say that Alder Lake & B660 combo raises the due diligence level for the average user when building a new system with these parts. But thanks to you and your work here, we are now aware of the possible issues. Thumbs-up!
what about Biostar?
Man you do the best reviews... even way back in your channels life, you two were awesome.
It seems like 15 years back you started your channel.
🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼🍀🍀🍀😎🤓
Sheeet I subscribed 7 years ago!
Great work!
Very very informative comparisons. Thanks for saving my budget!
Hi Steve, if you read this, I think have the temperature bar red is fitting, intuitive and provides more visual contrast for comparing CB score to temperatures, thanks for the good work!
Daaamm! After a loooong period of time SOYO is Back!
Cannot believe how shxt Gigabye, Asus and Asrock made their B660 budget motherboard. Pool VRM with high prices.
I want you to test the 12400 and 12100 with out extra fan on the VRMs, with and without power limits, to see how well they really do handle those CPU's .... the gigabytes especially as they are the most easy models to acquire world wide in most places...
Great review! Awesome work. You helped me allot with this. But I think if you would use air cpu cooler, specially with double fan support, the vrm temps will be much lower then water cooled. Would be nice if you just try it with a couple boards if this indeed helps.
Man, this is the video I needed. Thank you very much, love this channel ♥️
The Maxsun and Soyo results are really good. Nice.
Funny that the MSI B550 A Pro for Ryzen was already the "king" of the budget B550 boards. Seems like they have something going on with that series.
Soyo boards are still around? They were quite common in late 90's Poland, I myself got Celeron 466MHz with Soyo board in 1999, and I loved their designs as everything was fairly well placed and they retained an ISA slot for much longer than other brands. They kind of disappeared in early 2000's some time after the Socket A became the king , I remember they had a board called Dragon or something, but the price and availability wasn't too good and it might not been a top performer either so it was hard to justify the purchase. I remember going Shuttle at that time due to similar design and 5/6 PCI slots, I think AK31 and AK35GT2R for my Thunderbird and Palomino, after which Shuttle disappeared and I had a nightmare with Asus boards until I found out how rock stable Gigabyte boards became around P35 era.
was waiting for this video from hardware unboxed, thank you.
For the future videos it would be nice if some of the text was visually supported on the screen, even holding a box of a product would help. After watching two videos back to back about motherboards my ears are spinning and head is dizzy, most of the speaking part are just rows of numbers, dash's and letters. Really hard to follow, especially if the products are unknown for the viewer. Otherwise thumbs up form me, very useful stuff.
I am with Asrock PRO RS pretty happy with that price
Coming in very late to this video, since I'm now trying to help a friend with a potential new PC build. This is the wild wild west in terms of power limits and potential throttling and temperature and performance. Gotta appreciate the effort in testing and showing all this. With the recent debacle about 14th gen stability and Intel introducing new "baseline" and "default" profiles for the BIOS, this doesn't give me any confidence at all. Cheers for the work :)
MSI really the King of Motherboards now, in every segment they are ahead
Man, thanks a lot! No one does this kinda comparison! It's Very helpful.
My workplace is upgrading my work system and are using the Asus Prime B660M-A D4-CSM, which seems to be the same as the -A D4 in this video, minus one of the VRM heatsinks. It'll be running a 12700F, which seems like will work fine with the VRM solution. I'm nearly certain they will be using the stock cooler with that CPU, so we'll see how that goes.
Thank goodness for you making this video, and allowing me to rest easy that my employer hasn't selected a trash mobo for my new machine.
Steve just want to say really really appreciate your hardwork on this video as you took a month of testing! Resp+ 🙌 honest comparison
A very useful comparison and gives a stark contrast in the quality available, even at similar price points. One thing I would be interested to know is whether there's any variance in system power use between the boards. Is the excess heat just because of inadequate cooling capability, or is more power being turned to heat due to less power efficiency?
Ask this question in his community Q&A and you might get an answer if you have enough upvotes.
Almost only mATX mainboards...why? And there are so many more mainboard boxes on the table than are shown in the benchmarks :(. I was hoping to see boards like the ASUS Prime B660 Plus, ASUS B660 TUF Plus, MSI B660M Mortar, MSI B660 Tomahawk, Gigabyte B660 Gaming X, and so on. Yes, those are not super-budget, but they are the important ones for PC builders who don't need any Z690 boards - which are most of them, if we are honest, since CPU overclocking with normal means is almost dead by now.
I wonder how much better DS3H would compete if Gigabyte would replace this M.2 heatsink with second VRM heatsink. It's budget board so no one will place top end 4.0 drive in there right away, and slower drives don't really need heatsinks. And if someone really wants to upgrade to 4.0 SSD later they can get one with heatsink or they can even buy very cheap heatsink.
Small bump for any B660 board featuring the dual position mounting holes, as affordable socket 1700 compatible coolers can still be a bit scarce when over the counter shopping.
You know, it feels like we just get scalped more on motherboard pricing each generation. These boards are *bad* for how much they cost.
Wow. I didn't realise there was such a huge difference in performance and temp with same class mobos. MSI is impressive. Surprised about Asus and Gigabyte. Those were usually my go-to boards.
the performance is 100% predictable from the specs of the boards. The GIgabyte DS3h, D3H and Gaming (and D2h) are the same crappy board with different minor spec details. The Gigabyte Power is their version of the HDV (even worse). The Gigabyte Aorus Pro is similar to MSI's Pro A. MSI's crappier boards are the Pro E, Bomber, Pro G, Pro B. All those MSI boards would perform badly because they have no vrm heatsink. The difference is that if you are not careful when you are shopping you might not realize that the MSI Pro B660M-E is one of the worst B660 boards you can buy and basically a scam with the M.2 slot not even delivering the performance of the chipset, only 1 fan header, only 2 RAM slots, naked VRMs, and just overall a horrible board, whereas the MSI Pro B660M-A is a very nice board, but the names are almost identical.
MSI seems to be the only consistently decent brand
Agree, they may be a shady corporation but their product are really good except for laptops due to their flimsy chassis
They're no more shady than anyone else in this business, though they do seem the most willing to make changes.
I am sure Msi Australia are great guys...but msi has done terrible things in the past, just like the others yes. Although i must put evga above the rest.
And by the way...i have an msi z490 a-pro
@@Hardwareunboxed
I was waiting for this video for long to upgrade to alder lake. However, I just purchased the MSI B660M-A Wifi as I needed Wifi and the VRMs looked like they could handle a 12700. This video only made me happy for my decision.
Thanks
Dude , I love you so much , thanks for all the effort , my next MB will be the MSI mentioned :)
Wow... Good result for Maxsun and Soyo. Maybe next time HU need to review mini itx B660/H670 from asrock. Btw thanks for amazing video review 👍
I highly recommand checking out the maxsun terminater B660M, it has same vram performance but much better peripheral support and slots on the board for what i think the identical price.
I’m not in the market for a full sized board but still watched through the whole video. The amount of work put into this is insane.
Also, am I reading this right, the ASRock HDV can’t even run the 12900K properly at PL1=65W? Anandtech reviewed a NUC Compute Element card with a 12900 (PL1=65W) and it yielded an R23 score of almost 18000.
Man please I want u to review all b660 itx motherboards please.
Thanks for the hard work guys. Always appreciate the in depth testing
Thank you! Been waiting for this video.
thank you very much for explaining how each board behaves regarding power. amazing review
Great work, Steve. The variation between boards make for interesting content.
The Soyo Dragons bring back memories.
A lot of work there. Thank you. I'm looking forward to your ITX roundup. Here up over the MSI B660M-A is £162 on Amazon (cheaper if you're willing to wait a month) which begs the question: is it worth spending £18 extra to get the MSI Mortar for £180? Something for a follow-up video, perhaps?
Those Chinese boards are superficially impressive so perhaps you might do a deeper dive to look at the companies and their ranges of products?
I too would like to look at the other products from those Chinese manufacturers as they are literally the best performers in Steve's data and it sure is kinda superficial given the price.
both of them are grossly overpriced, you can buy the B660M-A for £130 from technextday in stock. £180 is far too much for the Mortar you'd best look at Z690 for that money.
@@thelawnet what boards are you referring to by both?
Looking forward to seeing the TUF and MORTAR results :)
To few people show how the boards behave with the non-K SKU's, I'm looking for a B660 MATX for a 12700 non-K right now :)
helped me a lot . have no words to appreciate
Be sure to update your BIOS when you get these boards. Multiple brands have had very bad performance issues with certain chips on their stock bios. The Gigabyte D3H in particular misbehaves BADLY with locked i5 chips on the launch bios.
As always, run some benchmarks and compare them to what that chip should be capable of
We always update to the latest BIOS.
Back in my days (lol) any board could run a compatible CPU at stock frequency. High-end motherboards were needed for overclocking. It makes the choice a lot more complex so thank you for these comparison videos.
Excellent coverage and information, what a load of data and time you put this mate, thanks really appreciate all this , keep them coming
How did you setup direct airflow to the VRM for these boards?
If I worked as hard as you guys I'd be a millionaire in a year.
Woah. Soyo, havent seen that brand since socket A days...
Hm... I'm looking at Asus Prime B660M-A D4 in EU region and the picture on the board does NOT feature a top heatsink! Your version is Asus Prime B660M-A D4 WIFI, which seems to have an additional heatskink besides the WIFI feature. Either that, or there is some dodgy regional difference between models.
Greatly appreciate the data on budgeted products. I look forward to the next dataset on more expensive, but still budgeted, motherboards.
It's honestly a shame you even have to bother collecting such data. Hopefully this eventually pushes motherboard manufacturers to increase the quality of their lower end products.
Thank you so much for this video! As a budget gamer, I really needed an in-depth insight like this one. Cheers!
Msi, Gigabyte, and Asus are really the only big company that makes the best mobo I thinks. While the 2 that are not popular really stand out from this video. Nice work.
vrm heatsinks are pretty cheap less than a dollar, strap one on a budget board and your 're safe
Have you been able to check which boards have a BCLK overclocking ability for locked SKUs? I know the Asus B660 Strix can OC the 12400 to 5GHz+ for example.
Thank you so much for doing this exhausting benchmarks! You are a true legend
I'm surprised at how bad the Pro RS is. It looks solid until you see these results.
The issues don't even stop here. th-cam.com/video/ZmVdg_FCGnk/w-d-xo.html