GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M AORUS PRO AX DDR4 Motherboard Experience

Nowadays, the 12th generation Of Core processors have been fully rolled out, for mainstream players, the 12th generation Core i5 is loved by players with its cross-level performance, excellent power control and affordable price, and at this time, with such an affordable motherboard product as B660, it is naturally expected by players.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture products as the mainstay of the mainstream player group, has been favored by players, this time GIGABYTE brings us GIGABYTE B660M AORUS PRO AX DDR4 motherboard (hereinafter referred to as "GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M Motherboard"), it has a good support for the latest 600 series Raiden 4 bus, PCIe 4.0 bus and many other new features, and the support for DDR4 memory also greatly reduces the threshold for players to experience 12 generations of Core. IT House has now received the Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard, let's take a look at how this motherboard performs in the actual experience.

Appearance introduction

GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard adopts M-ATX form factor, the overall use of a new visual appearance model, M.2 interface, South bridge chip, processor core heat dissipation 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 Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard adopts 12+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 Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard supports XMP 3.0 overclocking technology with support for DDR4 memory up to 5333MHz and higher.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard supports Smart Fan 6 technology, providing 6 hybrid fan sockets and 6 temperature sensors on the motherboard.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboards offer 2 PCIe slots, one near the processor that supports the PCIe 4.0 x16 specification.

RGB lighting is also provided under the south bridge chip cooling armor to highlight the player's faith logo.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboards offer 2 X.2 interfaces, both supporting the PCIe 4.0 x4 specification and supporting up to 22110 SSDs, delivering theoretical bandwidth performance up to 64Gb/s and NVMe SSD read performance of 7000MB/s. Four SATA3 interfaces are also available to facilitate the expansion of mass storage devices.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard also supports USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C, which provides 20Gbps high-speed data transfer, and a USB 3.2 Gen2 interface on the front panel is integrated on the motherboard.

In terms of network, GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard provides a 2.5Gbps high-speed network port, compatible with 10/100/1000/2500Mbps RJ45 network interface. It also features an Intel Wi-Fi 6 wireless network card by default and integrated Bluetooth 5.2 for better network connectivity and data transfer speeds.

In other interface configurations, GIGABYTE Snow Eagle B660M motherboard provides 4 USB 2.0 ports, 5 USB 3.2 ports, 1 USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C interface, 1 DP interface, 1 HDMI 2.1 interface and 1 set of audio interfaces. For players, excellent performance can lead to better performance release, next, let's take a look at the full BIOS design of the GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard.

BIOS experience

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M 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.

After entering advanced mode, gigabyte snow sculpture B660M motherboard provides a number of adjustment options, including memory overclocking, processor-related function adjustments, users can adjust the relevant BIOS settings according to actual needs.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M 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.

Performance

At present, the B660 motherboard is mainly aimed at the mainstream gaming market, so here is the test house chooses the Core i5-12600K processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card, while equipped with 16GB DDR4 3600MHz memory, in fact, most players can use up to GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. The specific information of the test platform is as follows:

Let's take a look at how the i5-12600K processor performs on a Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard, the Core i5-12600K processor features a 10-core, 16-threaded design with 6 performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores, with 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. Under the GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard, this processor CPU-Z single-threaded running score reached 726.7 points, multi-threaded 6814.3 points, easily surpassing the previous generation flagship processor i9-11900K.

In the Cinebench R23 test, the processor scored 1768 points for a single core and 16363 points for multi-core.

In the 3DMark CPu test, the Core i5-12600K performed equally well on gigabyte snow sculpture B660M motherboards, with a maximum thread score of 7911 points and a single thread score of 1009 points.

Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard supports DDR4 memory, and DDR4 memory is still a relatively cost-effective choice. At the same time, because the 600 series chipset has more improvements in a lot of hardware performance, so it can bring better memory performance, here we verify the performance of gigabyte snow eagle B660M motherboard in memory through AIDA64 memory test, in XMP overclocking mode, 3600MHz 16GB memory module, read around 55GB / s, write around 52GB / s, copy performance around 51GB / s, latency of 88.1 nanoseconds.

In terms of power consumption performance, GIGABYTE Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard has a large area of thermal armor in heat dissipation, and with Smart Fan 6 fan technology, it can be more intelligent and efficient to dissipate heat. Here we use the more intensive Prime95 stress test tool for processor and memory stress testing.

After 20 minutes of baking, the processor did not significantly downscal, with the P-core clock maintained at 4.48GHz and the E core clock maintained at 3.38 GHz. At this point, the processor temperature averages 77 degrees, the peak temperature is 87 degrees, and the peak power consumption reaches 140W. The average temperature of the graphics card is 81.5 degrees, the average power consumption is about 290W, and the motherboard performs stably throughout the process.

summary

Mainstream players often want a more cost-effective experience, and the combination of B660+DDR4 is exactly what they want to experience the 12th generation Core motherboard without burden, Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard in the inheritance of the 600 series chipset higher data bandwidth transmission capabilities and better power supply performance under the premise of still bringing a leapfrog performance experience. At the same time, the support of DDR4 memory also makes it a good companion for mainstream players in the future.

More importantly, Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard is very cost-effective price, but also let many players moved, 1099 yuan price with 12 generation Core i5, experience is not lost to the previous generation i9, if your budget is limited, but do not want to miss the 12th generation of Core cross-level performance improvement, then you may wish to pay attention to the Gigabyte Snow Sculpture B660M motherboard.