This year, the B660 series motherboard for the 12th generation Core processor was officially released. Many motherboard manufacturers have also launched B660 motherboards for different groups of people. Previously, the Z690 motherboard was mainly aimed at high-end e-sports scenarios, while the B660 focused more on the mainstream market. On the basis of sufficient power supply, it also has XMP 3.0 memory overclocking and higher bandwidth PCIe bus , giving mainstream players more balanced gaming performance.
Gigabyte AORUS series products are mainly aimed at e-sports scenarios. Against the backdrop of the change of DDR5 and DDR4, Gigabyte also brought the new Gigabyte B660 AORUS MASTER DDR4 motherboard (hereinafter referred to as "Gigabyte Super Carved B660 D4 motherboard"). IT Home has received this Gigabyte flagship B660 motherboard. Next, let’s take a look at its specific details and how it actually performed.
Appearance
Gigabyte Super Carved B660 D4 motherboard adopts a standard ATX board shape, and the overall adopts a new visual appearance. The M.2 interface and South Bridge chip part have large area of gray heat dissipation armor, which can quickly take away the waste heat generated during work. The panel area of
IO adopts a full coverage heat sink design, which can quickly take away the heat generated in the core area of the motherboard with high-quality thermal pad . The 2-ounce copper circuit board brings better electrical performance and power guarantee, and helps the motherboard to efficiently dissipate heat through the rapid copper thermal conductivity.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard adopts a 16+1+1 phase power supply design, the core part of the processor provides 60A Dr MOS power supply, and the 12th generation Core adopts a new hybrid architecture, so the BIOS configuration is also different from previous motherboard products.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard supports XMP 3.0 overclocking technology, supporting up to 5600MHz and higher DDR4 memory.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard supports Smart Fan 6 technology and provides 8 hybrid fan sockets, 7 temperature sensors and 2 external temperature sensor sockets on the motherboard.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard provides 3 PCIe slots, including the PCIe 4.0 x16 specification near the processor, and 1 PCIe 3.0 x4 and 1 PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.
Under the cooling armor, there are 3 M.2 interfaces, of which 2 M.2 interfaces support the PCIe 4.0 x4 specification, which can bring 64Gb/s theoretical bandwidth performance and 7000MB/s NVMe SSD read performance. In addition, 4 SATA3 interfaces are provided to facilitate the expansion of mass storage devices.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard also supports USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C interface, which can bring 20Gbps to tell data transmission. The motherboard also integrates the previous version of USB 3.2 Gen2 interface. In terms of network, the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard provides 1 .5Gbps high-speed network port, compatible with 10/100/1000/2500Mbps RJ45 network interface. In addition, it is equipped with Intel Wi-Fi 6 wireless network card by default and integrates Bluetooth 5.0 function, which can bring better network connection and data transmission speed. In other interface configurations, the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard provides 4 USB 2.0 interfaces, 5 USB 3.2 interfaces, 1 USB 3.2 Type-C interface, 1 DP interface, 1 HDMI 2.1 interface and 1 group of audio interfaces. To facilitate the lighting expansion of players' chassis, the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard also provides 2 RGB pins and 2 ARGB pins. For players, excellent performance can lead to better performance release. Next, let’s take a look at the full BIOS design of the Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard.
BIOS Experience
Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard BIOS continues AORUS's classic orange-black color scheme. After entering the BIOS, what is still caught your eye is the system information in simple mode, including CPU base frequency, memory frequency, temperature and other information.
where the memory frequency can be adjusted quickly through XMP configuration. This motherboard of Gigabyte can support DDR4 memory up to 5600MHz or above.
After entering the advanced mode, the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard provides many adjustment options, including memory overclocking and processor-related function adjustments. Users can adjust the relevant BIOS settings according to actual needs.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard supports two modes for players to choose from. The game mode uses all the computing power of the P core, bringing better power consumption control and temperature control; while the maximum performance mode enables all cores, better leveraging greater performance advantages in the multi-threaded scenario.
System information and startup options are basically not much different from the regular BIOS. System information displays the basic hardware information of the device, and the startup settings are closely related to us. At this stage, the device startup is basically above UEFI, so before using a new device, you must enable the CSM support option and enable UEFI support. This way you can start the device smoothly.
other functional options are very complete, basically covering the settings and adjustments of all the hardware supported by the motherboard.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard supports Smart Fan 6 technology, and provides 8 hybrid fan sockets, 7 temperature sensors and 2 external temperature sensor sockets on the motherboard, supporting smart fan start-stop technology. The fan curve setting is increased from the original 5 points to 7, and the fan speed control is more accurate.
For BIOS updates, Gigabyte provides Q-Flash PLUS one-click upgrade function. Users can plug the storage device containing BIOS upgrade files on the motherboard, press the Q-Flash PLUS button to achieve one-click upgrade, or they can quickly upgrade through the BIOS upgrade tool on the motherboard. Next, we will take a look at the performance of the Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard through hardware testing.
Hardware test
Considering that the B660 motherboard is mainly aimed at the mainstream gaming market, this time the IT Home test chose the Core i5-12600K processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card, and is equipped with 16GB DDR4 3600MHz memory. In fact, most players can match the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card at most. The specific information of the test platform is as follows:
First, let’s take a look at the performance of the processor. Here we choose the Core i5-12600K processor. This processor adopts a 10-core and 16-thread design, including 6 performance cores and 4 energy-efficiency cores, has 20MB Level 3 cache and 9.5MB Level 2 cache, and is also equipped with a UHD 770 graphics card, but does not support Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology. Among them, the basic frequency of the performance core is 3.7GHz, the maximum turbo frequency is 4.9GHz; the basic frequency of the energy efficiency core is 2.8GHz, and the maximum turbo frequency is 3.6GHz. The default power consumption is 125W and the maximum turbo power consumption is 150W. Through the game mode configuration in the Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard BIOS, we used CPU-Z to test this processor.
In this state, the 12th generation Core i5-12600K single-core scored 746.6 points, leading AMD Ryzen 9-5950X to nearly 100 points. For gamers, strong single-core performance can bring higher frame rate performance. Although the Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard is not specifically set for overclocking processor products, we can see through running scores that even the i5 can have a higher performance experience. In the CPU tests of
Cinebench R23 and DMark, the Core i5-12600K performed equally well on the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard. R23 single-core score was 1863 points, and multi-core score was 13366 points; in the 3DMark CPU test, single-core scored 1025 points and full-core scored 6760 points.
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard supports DDR4 memory. Considering the high price of DDR5 at this stage, DDR4 memory is still a more cost-effective choice for players.At the same time, since the 600 series chipset has improved a lot of hardware performance, it can bring better memory performance. Here we use AIDA64 memory test to verify the performance of the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard in memory. In XMP overclocking mode, the 3600MHz 16GB memory stick is read and written around 53GB / s, the copy performance is around 50GB / s, and the delay is 81.8 nanoseconds. In terms of power consumption performance, Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard has a large area of cooling armor for cooling, and combined with Smart Fan 6 fan technology, it can dissipate heat more intelligently and efficiently. Here we use the Prime95 stress test tool that has greater pressure on the processor to test the Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard. In the game mode of
BIOS, after 10 minutes of single copy of the processor, the processor core temperature reaches 77 degrees, the full core frequency remains at 4.48GHz, and the peak power consumption of the roaster process reaches 140W. The motherboard has stable performance, but in fact, using a good air-cooled cooling and cooling in home scenarios can fully meet daily usage needs.
summary
Gigabyte Super Engraving B660 D4 motherboard positioning is very clear. It still brings a higher performance experience while inheriting the higher data bandwidth transmission capabilities and better power supply performance of the 600 series chipset. At the same time, the support of DDR4 memory also makes it a good companion for future mainstream player games. High-end configurations such as
Z690+DDR5 are more suitable for professional e-sports players, which will inevitably bring higher costs, but high cost-effective configurations such as B660+DDR4 for the mainstream market will definitely be the mainstream solution for the future. If you have a limited budget but don't want to miss the performance improvement of the 12th-generation Core, then you might as well pay attention to the Gigabyte Super Carving B660 D4 motherboard.
