At this year's CES, the B660 series motherboard for the 12th generation Core processor was officially released, and many motherboard manufacturers also targeted the B660 motherboard for different groups of people, the previous Z690 motherboard was mainly for high-end e-sports scenarios, and the B660 was more focused on the mainstream market, on the basis of sufficient power supply, the PCIe bus also has XMP 3.0 memory overclocking and higher bandwidth, giving mainstream players more balanced game performance.
Gigabyte AORUS series products are mainly aimed at e-sports scenes, in the context of DDR5 and DDR4 changes, GIGABYTE also brought the new GIGABYTE B660 AORUS MASTER DDR4 motherboard (hereinafter referred to as "GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 Motherboard"). IT House has received this Flagship GIGABYTE B660 motherboard, and next, let's take a look at its specific details and how the actual tests have performed.
appearance
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard adopts the standard ATX form factor, the overall use of a new visual appearance shape, M.2 interface, South Bridge chip part has a large area of gray heat dissipation armor, can quickly take away the waste heat generated during work.
The IO panel area adopts a full-coverage heat sink design, and the high-quality thermal pad can quickly take away the heat generated in the core area of the motherboard. The 2-ounce copper circuit board provides better electrical performance and power assurance, and helps the motherboard dissipate heat efficiently through the rapid thermal conductivity of copper.
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard adopts 16+1+1 power phase design, in which the processor core part provides 60A Dr MOS power supply, and the 12th generation Core adopts a new hybrid architecture, so the BIOS configuration is also different from the previous motherboard products.
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboards support XMP 3.0 overclocking technology with support for DDR4 memory up to 5600MHz and higher.
The GIGABYTE Super Eagle 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's B660 D4 motherboard offers 3 PCIe slots, including the PCIe 4.0 x16 specification near the processor, plus 1 PCIe 3.0 x4 and 1 PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.
Under thermal armor, there are also 3 M.2 interfaces, of which 2 M.2 interfaces support the PCIe 4.0 x4 specification, which can bring up to 64Gb/s theoretical bandwidth performance and 7000MB/s NVMe SSD read performance. Four SATA3 interfaces are also available to facilitate the expansion of mass storage devices.
Gigabyte's B660 D4 motherboard also supports a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C interface, which can bring 20Gbps of tell data transfer, and the previous version of the USB 3.2 Gen2 interface is also integrated on the motherboard. In terms of networking, gigabyte super eagle B660 D4 motherboard provides a 2.5Gbps high-speed network port, compatible with 10/100/1000/2500Mbps RJ45 network interface. It also features the Intel Wi-Fi 6 wireless card by default and integrates Bluetooth 5.0 functionality for better network connectivity and data transfer speeds.
In other interface configurations, GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard provides 4 USB 2.0 ports, 5 USB 3.2 ports, 1 USB 3.2 Type-C port, 1 DP interface, 1 HDMI 2.1 interface and 1 set of audio interfaces, in order to facilitate the expansion of the lights in the chassis, GIGABYTE Super Eagle 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 Eagle B660 D4 motherboard.
BIOS experience
GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard BIOS continues AORUS's classic orange and black color scheme, after entering the BIOS, you will still be greeted by the system information in simple mode, including CPU fundamental frequency, memory frequency, temperature and other information.
The memory frequency can be quickly adjusted via XMP configuration, and GIGABYTE's motherboard can support DDR4 memory above 5600MHz.
After entering advanced mode, gigabyte super eagle B660 D4 motherboard provides a number of adjustment options, including memory overclocking, processor-related function adjustment, users can adjust the relevant BIOS settings according to actual needs.
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard supports two modes for players to choose between gaming and maximum performance, of which the game mode uses the full computing power of the P core to bring better power control and temperature control, while the maximum performance mode opens all cores to better play a greater performance advantage in multi-threaded scenarios.
System information and boot options are not much different from a regular BIOS. The system information shows the basic hardware information of the device, and the boot settings are closely related to us, at this stage the device boot is basically above the UEFI, so be sure to open the CSM support option before using the new device, and turn on UEFI support. This allows the device to be started smoothly.
The other functional options are very complete, basically covering the setup and adjustment of all the hardware supported by the motherboard.
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard supports Smart Fan 6 technology, providing 8 hybrid fan sockets, 7 temperature sensors and 2 external temperature sensor sockets on the motherboard to support intelligent fan start-stop technology. The fan curve setting has been increased from the original 5 points to 7, and the fan speed control is more precise.
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 you can quickly upgrade through the BIOS upgrade tool in the motherboard. Next, let's take a look at the performance of the Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard through hardware measurement.
Hardware testing
Considering that the B660 motherboard is mainly aimed at the mainstream gaming market, the IT house chose the Core i5-12600K processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card, while equipped with 16GB DDR4 3600MHz memory, in fact, most players have the most with GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card. The specific information of the test platform is as follows:
First of all, let's take a look at the performance of the processor, here we choose the Core i5-12600K processor, which uses a 10-core 16-thread design, which contains 6 performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores, has 20MB L3 cache and 9.5MB L2 cache, also with UHD 770 graphics, but does not support Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology. Among them, the performance core base frequency is 3.7GHz, the maximum turbo frequency is 4.9GHz, and the energy efficiency core base frequency 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. Using the game mode configuration in the BIOS of the GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard, we tested this processor with CPU-Z.
In this state, the 12th Generation Core i5-12600K single-core runs 746.6 points, nearly 100 points ahead of the AMD Ryzen™ 9-5950X, and for gamers, the powerful single-core performance can lead to higher frame rate performance. Although the GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard is not specifically set for overclocking processor products, we can see through the running score that even the i5 can have a cross-level performance experience.
In the Cinebench R23 and 3DMark CPU tests, the Core i5-12600K performed equally well on the Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard. R23 scored 1863 points for a single core and 13366 points for multiple cores, and 1025 points for a single core and 6760 points for a full core score in the 3DMark CPU test.
Gigabyte Super Eagle 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, because the 600 series chipset has improved more in a lot of hardware performance, so it can bring better memory performance, here we verify the performance of GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard in terms of memory through AIDA64 memory testing, in XMP overclocking mode, 3600MHz 16GB memory module, read and write around 53GB / s, copy performance around 50GB / s, latency of 81.8 nanoseconds.
In terms of power consumption performance, GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard has a large area of heat dissipation armor in heat dissipation, and with Smart Fan 6 fan technology, it can be more intelligent and efficient to dissipate heat. Here we test the GIGABYTE B660 D4 motherboard with a Prime95 pressure test tool that puts more pressure on the processor.
In BIOS game mode, after 10 minutes of full-core processor copying, the processor core temperature reaches 77 degrees, the full core frequency is maintained at 4.48GHz, and the peak power consumption of the roaster process reaches 140W. The performance of the motherboard is stable, in fact, the i5-12600K can fully meet the daily use of daily use by using a good air-cooled heat dissipation in the home scene.
summary
Gigabyte Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard positioning is very clear, it inherits the 600 series chipset's higher data bandwidth transmission capabilities and better power supply performance, but also brings a cross-level performance experience. At the same time, the support of DDR4 memory also makes it a good companion for mainstream players in the future.
A high-end configuration such as Z690+DDR5 is more suitable for professional e-sports players, which will inevitably bring higher costs, but a cost-effective configuration such as B660+DDR4 for the mainstream market must also be a mainstream solution for some time to come. If you're on a budget and don't want to miss out on the performance gains of the 12th Generation Core leapfrog, keep an eye on the GIGABYTE Super Eagle B660 D4 motherboard.