Editor's comments: MSI's MAG motherboard has many fans, and the "new weapon" pulled out from the "arsenal" this time has also brought me a lot of surprises, I believe that this B660 will be a very good popular motherboard.
Appearance: Highly recognizable family style
The MSI MAG series focuses on mid-range popular products, and the product named after MORTAR is one of the "star models", it also has a loud Chinese called mortar, I believe that this name will be more well-known in the player circle.
The MSI B550M mortar used silver cooling armor, CPU power, 2 M.2 heatsinks and the chipset's heat sink independent of each other, this design can create a modular feeling.
The soft IO bezel that comes with the motherboard is silver, which is very compatible with the overall appearance of the motherboard.
The CPU power supply is designed for dual 8Pin, as a B660 motherboard, this design can ensure that the processor can be stably powered, but also to avoid the port damage caused by insufficient port conditions under high load conditions.
This motherboard is a DDR5 memory version and comes standard with four DIMM DDR5 memory slots.
It is not uncommon to give the LGA1700 a picture to adapt to Intel 12th generation processors, including Core, Pentium, Celeron and so on.
The heat shielding project for the power supply of the motherboard is done well, and the mat that assists heat transfer is flat on the components, and it is necessary to give MSI a thumbs up to the details of the workmanship.
The first PCI-E x16 slot on this motherboard supports PCIe 4.0, which is a CPU-based PCIe slot. Both M.2 interfaces cover thermal armor, which is rare in its class of motherboards.
The chipset's thermal armor is printed with the eye-catching MORTAR logo, and the rounded corner pattern on the armor is a bit cute like "big white".
B660 motherboards generally come standard with 4 SATA connectors.
There are four lights at the bottom that can help players better understand how their pc is performing.
Open the M.2 thermal armor to see the full picture of the interface, this motherboard only supports 2280 specifications of solid-state drives.
Motherboard disassembly: leapfrog power stacking
The appearance part is basically over, let's just open and dismantle! Take a look at the "aroma" of the power supply module.
First look at the power supply part, you can see that the horizontal and vertical sides of a total of 12 + 1 + 1 power supply is very conspicuous. DrMOS model is ISL99360 its maximum withstand current of 60A, is the high-end motherboard power supply material "regular customer", MSI some of the older mortar motherboards also use the same DrMOS.
The main control of power supply is RAA229132.
The PWM controller is the MPS M2940A.
B660 chipset.
Small crab ALC1200 sound card chip from Realtek.
Also from Realtek is the RTL8125B, a 2.5G Ethernet solution.
The GL3590 chip is a USB 3.2 Gen2 hub controller, so this motherboard theoretically supports providing "fast charging" functions to Apple devices.
Test Platform Introduction:
memory
For a pair of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 5200 16GB RAM.
hard disk
Use the Samsung 980 Pro 2T.
BIOS & Software:
Before installing the machine, it is necessary to enter the BIOS as usual to check whether the motherboard can successfully identify the hardware, and it has to be said that the BIOS that MSI comes with is very easy to use, and the overview of the whole machine can be read under the [EZ interface].
Because the CPU tested this time is not a model with the K suffix, the BIOS interface mainly shows how to configure the memory XMP. There are two ways, the first is to enter the Advanced interface, find the Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) in the OC options, the option inside is the default XMP configuration; the second is to use the mouse to move to the upper left of the interface to put the XMP Profile area, now lit "1" and "2" is the default XMP configuration, click to select, the operation is very fool-like.
Once in the system, you can go to MSI's official website to install MSI Center software, which can monitor the CPU frequency, CPU occupancy and temperature of the machine, and also identify the hardware on the machine and the current driver version.
Hands-on testing: Surprising performance
First, let's take a look at the basic information of this Core i5-12400: 6 cores and 12 threads, all cores are P cores with Hyper-Threading Technology.
We tested the CPU with CPU-Z, with a single-core score of 707 and a multi-core score of 4980, a single-core score comparable to an i9-11900K and a multi-core score slightly higher than an i5-11600K.
Then there's the much-anticipated Geekbench 5 test, with a measured transcript score of 1711 and a multi-core score of 9475, which is also comparable to the i9-11900K, and a multi-core score slightly higher than the i5-11600K.
Theoretically, the roaster test should be put to the end, but because the results of this platform are too surprising, we will announce to you in advance, in the AIDA 64 FPU single baking stability test, Core i5-12400 with MSI MAG B660M MORTAR motherboard This plate U temperature is 51 ° C and 29 ° C, and our ambient room temperature is about 15 ° C. At first, I thought there was something wrong, but the monitoring software can see that the CPU is already in a full power state of 75W, and it can maintain such a low temperature performance under the air cooling and heat dissipation, so I can only lament the high performance of this generation of 12 generation Core processors.
Then there is the memory running test, we mainly focus on the read and write speed of the DDR5 memory, its test read speed is 73191MB/s, the write speed is 72856MB/s, the delay is 83.1ns, slightly inferior to the i5-12600K with the high-end Z690 motherboard data (R: 76751MB/s, W:73729MB/s), but the read and write speed is still much higher than the 11th generation i9-11900K with Z590 and DDR4 3600 RAM (R: 53189MB/s, W: 52627MB/s).
It is not uncommon to open 3DMARK for game performance simulation testing, the regular Fire Strike Extreme test has a total score of 10251, a graphics card score of 10714 (RTX 3060 12GB), and a physical score of 23239.
DX12 has become the mainstream of today's 3A, so we conducted a Time Spy test, the FREQUENCy of the CPU reached 4.388GHz during the test, and the final test score was 8961, the graphics card score was 8829, and the CPU score was 9791.
In the PCMARK 10 EXTENDED test, the comprehensive score of this platform was 8839, of which the common basic functions scored 9997, the productivity score was 9408, the digital content creation score was 10391, and the game score was 16881.
The CROSSMARK test is also a running score to assess the comprehensive performance of the whole machine platform, which has a comprehensive score of 1798, of which the productivity score is 1687, the creativity score is 1947, and the responsiveness score is 1710.
UL Procyon video editing performance
UL Procyon image editing performance
There is also a focus on digital creation performance of UL Procyon test, this set of the whole machine Photo Editing and Video Editing scores are 8104 and 6741, respectively, of which the picture editing test relies more on CPU performance and the video editing test relies more on GPU performance.
Easter Egg Chapter: Ji Xian can also be competent in design work
The second Easter egg is considering that the current graphics card premium is more, and some "waiting parties" may not start with the graphics card immediately, so we have also done the relevant performance test of the set display.
Let's take a look at the overall performance score of PCMARK 10 EXTENDED, which has an overall score of 4043, of which 9178 are common basic functions, 7609 are productivity, 5364 are digital content creation, and 1928 are games. In fact, the difference with plugging in the RTX 3060 12GB solo is mainly reflected in the game (graphics processing) and digital creation (rendering acceleration) two aspects.
This difference is even more pronounced in the UL Procyon test, which is closer to the actual application, with a picture editing test score of 7013 and a video editing test score of 2504 for the display platform. It shows that relying on the powerful performance of the Core i5-12400, even if there is no unique picture editing ability of this platform, it is still excellent, but the video editing ability is lacking.
The last Easter egg is that the motherboard does not have a standard drive U disk, after the whole machine is installed, if there is no disconnection or like us before the evaluation and unblocking, the whole network has no driver circulation, it is necessary to use the ancient optical drive to read the disc to install the driver, hearing the familiar disc rotation, I seem to return to the first decade of the 21st century, although the feelings are full, but still hope that MSI will drive the U disk to the mid-range motherboard.
Summary: Another good product in the "Mortar" series
MSI mortar series motherboard has always been a symbol of high cost performance, today's protagonist MSI B660M mortar also inherits the characteristics of the series of good workmanship and materials, for the small partners who want to build a 12th generation Core host, this motherboard is very cost-effective.
For the face value control, the silver shell of the motherboard with white hardware, a high-aesthetic machine can be easily assembled, it is a pity that the mortar series has always been a lightless motherboard, which cannot meet the "light pollution" needs of light players.
Overall, if you're a gamer who wants to group a mainstream desktop PC and happens to be in the writing phase right now, the MSI B660M mortar will be an option worth prioritizing ahead.