**A Surprising Find: The Best Gaming Motherboards Under $150**

As we continue to explore the world of gaming motherboards, we've come across some unexpected surprises. In this article, we'll take a closer look at our experience with three B660 motherboards that offer excellent performance and features for under $150.

**The Not-So-Good News: The ASUS PRIME Z690-A**

We started by testing the ASUS PRIME Z690-A, which is a high-end motherboard designed for Intel's latest processors. However, what we found was surprising - despite its impressive specs and powerful CPU, this board fell short in terms of overall performance. With the 12700K processor, our system scored an average of around 18 in the SYSMARK benchmark, which is below par compared to other boards on the market.

But what's even more astonishing is that we were able to experience system instability with this board, even at lower clock speeds. While it's not uncommon for high-end motherboards to require tweaking and fine-tuning, the ASUS PRIME Z690-A seemed to be more finicky than expected. We ultimately had to dial back the settings in the BIOS to achieve stability, which is a bit of a letdown.

**The Steel Legend: A B660 Motherboard that Surpassed Expectations**

On the other hand, we were thoroughly impressed with the ASRock Steel Legend B660. This motherboard offers many of the same features as its more expensive counterparts, but at a significantly lower price point. We purchased the Wi-Fi version for around $150, which is about 10 dollars more than the non-Wi-Fi model.

We pushed this board to its limits in games and synthetic workloads, and it handled everything with ease. Even when we overclocked the processor beyond 5GHz and reached a whopping 200 watts, the Steel Legend remained stable and performed flawlessly. We also found that our 3600MHz memory worked perfectly right out of the box, which is no small feat.

**The Verdict: The Steel Legend is Our Top Pick**

While the ASRock Steel Legend B660 may not have all the bells and whistles of more expensive motherboards, it offers an unbeatable value proposition. For those looking to buy a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 or i3 processor (and a little overclocking fun), this board is a great choice.

**DDR5 Motherboards: A Separate Review**

We also wanted to explore the performance of DDR5 motherboards on these boards, so we'll be doing a separate review soon. We'll be testing several B660 models with DDR5 memory and comparing their performance in various workloads. Stay tuned for that review!

**Choosing the Right Motherboard for Your Needs**

When choosing a motherboard, there are many factors to consider - feature set, price point, compatibility, and more. With so many options available on the market, it can be overwhelming to decide which board is right for you.

In our experience with these B660 motherboards, we found that while they may not have all the high-end features of more expensive models, they still offer excellent performance and value. Whether you're a gamer or just looking for a reliable system for everyday use, there's a motherboard on this list that's sure to meet your needs.

**The 12th Gen Intel Core i4 and i3 Processors: A Great Value Option**

If you're in the market for a new processor but don't want to break the bank, we recommend taking a look at the 12th Gen Intel Core i4 or i3 processors. Both of these CPUs offer six cores (plus e-cores) and are well-suited for gaming and content creation.

While they may not be as powerful as some of the higher-end processors on the market, they offer an unbeatable value proposition. With prices starting at around $200, you can get a great system with plenty of headroom for overclocking - all without spending top dollar.

**Join the Discussion**

We'd love to hear from our readers! Have any questions or comments about these motherboards or your own experiences with them? Join us in the forums at [insert forum URL] and let's discuss all things motherboard.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ena lot of people have the expectation that you could go out and buy any alder lake motherboard and pair it with any alder lake cpu you might pick up the 12900k on sale and then want to pair it with a less expensive motherboard this is a bad idea i'm going to show you why all right for our motherboard roundup we've got msi asrock asus and gigabyte represented in our stack here accidentally messing things up we're going to do ddr5 boards separately there is a ddr4 version of this board we'll take a look at that i reviewed the ddr5 version of this board separately but we've got a slightly more expensive b660 motherboard a less expensive b660 motherboard depending on the day and then an inexpensive b660 motherboard not all of these motherboards will handle cpus the same way it's a really sort of interesting situation intel historically has had pl1 and pl2 those are i mean i'm oversimplifying here but how much power the cpu is permitted to consume for whatever duration and pl one it'll use more power for a little while it'll burst and try to deal with that workload but not just power usage but heat generation and heat generation sort of becomes an issue that 12 900 k it can use 241 watts flat out sustained and as long as you keep it cool it will run so you get a really interesting situation when you've got a 12 900k or 12700k or some other cpu because if you can keep it cool and you can keep it fed with power meaning that the motherboard can supply that power for a sustained period of time it'll run with higher performance now gaming is kind of a bursty workload the game will be busy the game will be less busy the game will be more busy um if you have fewer cores the core stay busy longer but in a nutshell it's a bursty workload whereas like cinebench sidobich is running flat out as fast as you can it's also a really weird situation because this is the i5 the i5 12 600k this is 10 cores it's six alder lake p cores plus four efficiency cores 10 cores total it is a very weird situation we find ourselves in that 10 cores would be a a thing that is an i5 like that's market competition doing that right i've also got the i3 which is six alder lake peak cores this is the i5 12 400 which is the six alder lake peak horse so four alder lake peak cores six alder like p cores six alder light peakers plus four efficiency cores this is sort of the chain that we we find ourselves going up in there's also the 12700k see when i started doing this video the 12 700k was about 350. but you can pretty regularly find it at least in the us for around 300 and the 1200 400k you can pretty regularly find for around 150. those are really good deals the 12700k is interesting though because it can consume up to 220 230 watts i mean it's 12 cores you've only lost four efficiency cores and the four efficiency cores didn't use that much power in the first place so with these motherboards i'm going to start with the 12700k and see how these motherboards do in a sustained workload with the 12700k and for gaming with the 12700k that's eight p cores and four efficiency cores and then we can step down accordingly to see what cpu would actually work do we actually even have any overclocking headroom because this pl1pl2 thing not technically an overclock that's just how much power the thing will use when it's running full time if we have a little bit of headroom in any of these motherboards we'll be able to overclock the 12700k just a little bit and have more overclocking headroom for the i5 the other i5 or the i3 it's a really interesting situation for our test bench we're going to be using the sapphire nitro plus for cooling this is a 360 millimeter aio it's sort of new from sapphire it's their initial offering i'm not gonna go too hard on it it is definitely an initial offering from sapphire but it's not too bad but it's maximum overkill for this build i mean our 12 400 has a thousand watt power supply with a 6900 xt in it that's overkill but what we're testing here is the motherboard so maybe it makes sense because i want you to be able to buy the 12 400 with a hundred ish dollar motherboard because that's a pretty good deal first up our gigabyte board at the time that i'm doing this video this is around 140 dollar us motherboard as dual pci express 4.0 by 4 m.2 two and a half gig lan it has built-in wi-fi built-in wi-fi or not is going to make a bigger difference to price in this area than most things the motherboard bundle is very basic you basically get an i o shield a movable wi-fi antenna take note here other companies that include the really cheap antennas even on this inexpensive board this is a good wi-fi antenna a couple sata cables coupling about two screws there's not even a manual it's just an installation paper if we take a closer look at our rear i o we've got two usb 2.0 combination ps2 mouse this is our wi-fi 6 interface here again wi-fi makes a bigger difference for price in this area than one might think we've got hdmi out dual display port out that's sort of a differentiator for this price class yeah the usb interface is one usb 3.2 gen 2 type c and everything else is 3.2 gen 1 plus 6 total usb 2.0 so everything is 5 gigabit except for this one type c which is 10 gigabit which is nice you're not always guaranteed 10 gigabit at this price point of course there's no type c front panel connector you do have a single 30 pin connection for your front panel usb as well as a couple of usb 2.0 headers here at the bottom and standard front panel audio out including spdif now take note of power delivery we do have a heatsink on this side but no heatsink along the top here oh it's going to be interesting when we get at our fleer next up asrock b660 pro rs remember this is our ddr4 motherboard from asrock it's got a similar configuration to many of the other boards but not everything's the same at the rear i o we have two usb 2.0 ports a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard port as we see on others bios flashback so that you can flash the bios after the fact that's pretty handy hdmi displayport usb 3.2 gen1 usb 3.2 gen1 under the gigabit lan so a total of four five gigabit usb ports and the lan is just single gigabit and then of course we've got our audio out this motherboard is a full size atx motherboard sometimes you see cost down motherboards come in in micro atx but this is a full atx that does give us an extra x16 slot physical which is x4 electrical through the chipset it is pci express 4.0 by 4. it is also worth noting that the pci express by 1 slots are open ended which means that if you run this motherboard with like a pci express you know buy two capture card or something that uses two pc express lanes it could still function in the pci express by one slot the card will physically fit in there it's just the extra bit of the card will stick out so interesting stuff this motherboard does feature a total of three m.2 one at the top here one here one here well technically four if you count the m.2 wi-fi which is optional here that is an e-key wi-fi interface another thing that i'm seeing that i like is a big heat sinks on the vrm area for our rs pro dual 30 pin connections plus usb type c so this motherboard has a total of seven four pin fan headers two at the top one at the bottom front edge two along the very bottom and one at the mid board this motherboard also has four rgb headers one 50 50 header at the bottom and three digital headers one at the bottom edge here and two up top we have four sata connections an rs232 header and a single usb 2.0 header for extra expansion i feel like that we can't complain about usb on this motherboard because it's got so much usb connectivity for the front panel usbc and four usb 3.0 but you can use a breakout cable to go from one of these back to the back panel so you get even more rear usb i o on to the next board the asrock b660m steel legend now this one is a micro atx motherboard but it costs about ten dollars more than the rs660 but it's got a two and a half gig lan and some other features we'll take a look at so in the box you get a you get a steel legend keycap some m.2 hardware rear i o shield also we got our dual sata six gigabit per second cables so for the steel legend what do you get for the extra 10 bucks well notice we've got two heatsinks above and below it's a nine phase vrm they say on the box so we'll test that you got your m.2 here m.2 for wi-fi as well as an m.2 down here it's really two usable m.2 plus an m.2 e key for wi-fi then we've got our ddr4 dimm slots usb-c front panel and a 30-pin front panel four four plus two sata connections dual front panel 2.0 usb 2.0 so we've got a total of five four pin fan headers we've got our pci express 5.0 by 16 expansion slot and then two pci expressed by one the ends of the slot are open so you could use a a slot with more lanes just know that it's going to run at fewer lanes so the car may not function correctly depending on exactly what it is for the rear i o we've got a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard two usb 2.0 ports four five gigabit usb ports a dragon land 2.5 gig that's based on the real technique we've got a 7.1 audio solution based on the realtek alc897 get display port out and hdmi out for your igpu and about flashback button we have three digital rgb headers two at the top here one at the bottom edge and a 50 50 you know analog rgb header next up in our test is the asus prime b660m a d4 why did they come up with these names this motherboard is interesting for two reasons one the first one that i got was doa can't hold that against asus sometimes weird things happen no no this is the replacement it works fine this motherboard also is really weird in another respect it has that pretty severe price fluctuation at the time that i'm shooting this video it is 130. i actually paid 140 for this one so it's already got gone down ten dollars in price i've seen it as much as 160. this motherboard does not include wi-fi so a little bit a little bit of volatility and pricing not the most expensive board but also definitely not the least expensive this motherboard does have two usb 10 gigabit ports at the rear i o four usb 2.0 ports one displayport two hdmi one intel intel gigabit single gigabit ethernet three audio jacks and a ps2 combo mouse and keyboard jack it has two m.2 slots four sata connections four five gigabit front panel usb connections and one type c front panel usb connection so asus has got the usb ports i've prepped their board for installation a couple things i noticed right away there's no heatsink at all for either m.2 i mean that's cost down board he sank yes he sank no at the top this does not bode well we have otherwise a pretty intelligent layout this x16 slot is actually only x1 electrical this one is x4 not a terrible layout and this pcie slot is limited to pc express 4.0 not five for the rear i o i think i would have much rather had four five gigabit ports than two 10 gigabit ports but maybe that's just me okay okay okay let's break our results down the first question was can we buy a b660 motherboard and run a higher end intel alder lake family cpu in it because you know things looks like too much has been cut the answer from initial testing is it depends a 12 900 k and a ks is simply too much for these boards i mean it might work but you're going to leave some performance on the table with that cpu and what kind of performance you're going to leave on the table well it's not gaming performance i mean the gaming performance of the 12 700k and the 12 900k is basically identical it's the productivity multi-core and the 129k that is really the difference and also needs more wattage which is really the differentiating factor on these lower cost motherboards how much power can you deliver to the cpu i mean the 12700k really is essentially the same as the 12 900k i mean okay the 12900k the clocks are just a little bit higher and the ks is a little bit higher than that but they're not good deals for gaming if you're building a gaming computer they're the highest in thing the 12 700k is probably the best bang for the buck at around 300 to 350 at the time that i'm making this video you can get the 12 400 which i also think is great and the 12 600k and get you know six alder lake you know the p cores but uh motherboards when the 12700k launched was over two hundred dollars more like three hundred dollars can you get a reasonable motherboard for 150 to power that 12700k and on down that's what i set out to answer now our setup our test setup and everything else is pretty simple we've got a radeon rx 6800 xt this is the highest end gpu that i think you'll probably test on this system we want to know if any of these boards lower overall game performance because the cpu is bottlenecking or something about the motherboard is throttling or something is slower than it should be so if the game performance is not worse with this gpu as we switch out motherboards then it's not going to be worse with any lower tier gpu as well i also tested with ddr4 3600 with a command rate of one this is pretty fast memory for ddr4 and it will be a challenge to less expensive motherboards you need more ground planes you need better routing now it's probably also true that if you're building a budget builder building a lower cost build you're not super concerned with memory speed but in case you are we tested our ssd it was a sabrina pcie 4 4 terabyte ssd plenty of room for everything again maximum overkill and our 360 millimeter sapphire aio also overkill for this build but done to make sure that the main variables are related to the motherboard and not really any of the other components that doesn't suggest that you need to go this overboard when you're doing your build that will let us test the cpu to see if the cpu works as good as it possibly can because if the same cpu is faster in one board than another and it's not down to an out of the box overclock then you know that's something we need to talk about that's maybe a problem but also do we have a little bit more uh overclocking headroom maybe there's another trade-off for other features it's until the cpu itself is properly supported we can't really talk about the other features and we also can't really talk about the cost trade-off unless the motherboards properly support the highest end cpu that you want to run so at the bottom of our result stack is the gigabyte b660m ds3h i really really think they made a big mistake not having a heatsink on the topmost vrm but also at the same time it was a little impressive that it worked as well as it did without a heatsink in our thermal testing and our flear thermal imaging they do overheat and they will cause our 12700k to throttle down uh when it's allowed to turbo all the time for basically pl2 all the time and that was a little bit of a rug pull on intel's part right before the alder lake cpus were launching they said hey we'll just let cp use turbo all the time we paid 140 for the board but without wi-fi it's also around 120 dollars making it the cheapest motherboard in the roundup stack and i will concede that for gaming it is serviceable but for cinebench it's going to be throttle city after about 30 minutes to an hour with good airflow on our test bench you know the vrm components they are rated for 115c and hardware info 64 only reported 100c but we're seeing well over 100c on our thermal imaging uh to say nothing of the actual hotspots gaming performance is not going to be hitting the board as hard as cinebench so gaming performance was basically okay it was also a little bit weird that out of the box gigabyte seemed to be configured to allow the 12700k to turbo all the time now that is something that intel actually supports and technically this generation is not really considered an overclock whereas in the past multi-core enhancement was kind of considered that it's not exactly the same thing i'm glossing over some details here but basically alder lake is permitted to use a lot more power and that's on by default when i think on this board it probably should be off by default next in our lineup was the asrock b660 pro rs this is also around 140 dollars but it has no on-board wi-fi and out of the box it has the more conservative cpu settings azeroth calls it dual tau boost so initially the performance was a little bit lower than the other boards that we tested however enabling this and only this allowed the cpu to consume 190 watts which is kind of what i expected and what the other boards were basically doing out of the box our vrms would heat to around 90 degrees c but with reasonable airflow this isn't a problem because they have a heatsink on both sets of vrms and everything there game performance was unaffected and initially the 3600 memory trained at a command rate of 2t whereas on other boards this same memory trained at a command rate of 1t however i was able to manually select 1t training and that was stable throughout testing including both warm and cold boots so the 12700k is the absolute maximum limit for this board and that is uh it's my opinion that this is sort of the minimum board that you want to go with if you're going to get a 12 700k and your cpu is going to use about 200 watts if you're going to use less of a cpu then you're not going to have a problem but also this seat this board lacks 10 gigabit uh usb and you're probably going to want to look at some of the other feature details of this motherboard before you you know make a final decision the asus board is really interesting when it comes to thermals letting it run for a long time a little less interesting but let me show you what i mean it telegraphs what its problem is going to be see if you can hear so i'm just running cinebench from being cool and it's not really that the cpu is struggling out of the box this motherboard will run that i7 at 210 watts and it configures pl2 for 241 watts at least according to hardware info 64. the problem is that after a while it'll throttle down you can see that in the cpu temperature initially the cpu temperature is like 80 88 degrees our 360 is keeping up with it it is a little bit it's not an overclock it's that cpu thing i was telling you about before the cpu's running within spec but at 210 watts but eventually the vrm on the motherboard can't keep up the cpu temperature falls off to 60-ish degrees c clocks fall off and you can hear the cpu fans working not quite as hard notice that even though cinebench is still running their fans have backed off it restarted you can hear that in the fans and now they've backed off again even though cinebench is still running what's going on the vrms the vrms are burn your finger off hot even with a single rear exhaust fan which is responsible for a decent amount of airflow over the board it just isn't enough to remove heat from a sustained workload like this it's definitely on the struggle bus after about an hour of running cinebench it's difficult for it to make it through time spy without crashing the reported temperature in hardware info 64 was only about 93 degrees c but the flear especially on the one side of vrm so it's quite a bit warmer than 93 degrees c is that related i don't know but it's concerning you can't make it through 3d mark time spy overall for gaming and other benchmarks with this motherboard it's a little bit of a mixed bag if you run far cry 6 for an extended period of time eventually it will start to thermal throttle at the default settings for the 12700k you can get a good 12 700k experience on this motherboard but it's necessary to dial the settings down a little bit the out of box defaults push that i7 12700k just a little bit too much in our full lineup of other motherboards the pl1 value the wattage value basically like how much is this using when you're running cinebench i mean i'm oversimplifying a little bit is reported to be between 190 and 220 watts with our i7 of course the more power the cpu uses the better it's going to do in benchmarks and everything else mostly artificial benchmarks it doesn't make much of a difference in gaming but there's something weird going on with this asus motherboard and the defaults because it's using just a little bit too much power and because it's using a little bit too much power it eventually will throttle even in my relatively open air test bench system that affects the benchmarks if the system is cool then the quick benchmarks like babco cyst mark and everything else look good but when it's been on for a while and it's been heating up and it's been running far cry or cinebench or whatever in the background then the performance is not as good our overall score from babco sysmark is 18 which isn't the best score of the bunch even though the cpu the power that the cpu is allowed to use on this board is a little higher than average compared with our other boards in the end attaining system stability by dialing things down from the defaults just a little bit in the asus bios made a pretty stable system but i don't think you should have to do that and necessarily you're going to have the skills to do that out of the box it's very surprising this result so i don't recommend this asus motherboard for the 12700k should be fine for the i5 12 600k and below but yeah wow surprising very surprising and then there's our asrock steel legend b660 this board cost more but it's definitely a spend more get more kind of a situation i couldn't find it without wi-fi but with wi-fi it was around 150 dollars so that's only about 10 more than the uh you know non-wi-fi version theoretically would be but ten dollars buys a lot uh better vrms and the steel legend had no problems in games or synthetic workloads in fact i even pushed a five gigahertz overclock pushing it beyond 200 watts and that steel legend handled that like a champ with this board i did need to tweak a few things in bios but my 3600 memory worked perfectly right out of the box in babco crossmark it scored exactly where i'd expected a non-throttling completely unleashed to 12700k to score i think still legend would probably be my overall recommendation if you're on a budget and if you're buying a 12 700k or less alder like families intel cpu and you're planning to you know juice it a little bit in fact the steel legend is probably overkill if you're gonna get you know one of the i5s or even an i3 i mean to be sure if if you buy a z690 board you will be getting more features and better stuff and if you buy a higher end b660 you're gonna get more features and better stuff but you can have the absolute best gaming performance that you can get on the intel platform without buying the 12900k or the kx and even without buying a 300 motherboard this is it even with the worst motherboard here a gaming type workload with the i7 was not really a failure per se just wouldn't be my recommendation because of the because of the aforementioned flaws now for the ddr5 boards that i mentioned before i've got a separate review of the msi mortar b660 but i've decided to break the ddr5 boards out into a separate roundup this video's already getting kind of long and i think it's a given that the ddr5 boards are going to cost a little bit more because ddr5 so we'll do a roundup of ddr5 motherboards next so if that's something you'd like to see or you've been considering a board or lamenting overboard or obsessing over a board let me know in the comments below what ddr5 b660 boards you've been considering and i will probably pick it up from newegg or micro center or somewhere and do a roundup like this with b660 to see how it goes now to be sure i think the 12 400 and the 12 600 k those are also really good value cpus both of those you get six alder lake p cores the big cores it's just a question of whether you want any e cores or not i mean an i5 that is 6p cores plus a bunch of e cores that's a lot of cores and an i5 that's kind of bananas that's going to work fine in any of these boards and the i the i5 12 400 and the i3 that i was showing before all of those will work fine in these boards for even extended workloads so we may actually be able to look at some of the even more low end like maybe the 610s i don't know i'm well this is level one this has been a quick roundup of b660 motherboards that are about 150 dollars i was kind of surprised that they they generally worked as well as they did for non you know rendering non cinebench type workloads but the feature differences in terms of what you get on the board the nick the audio the m.2 interfaces whether or not you get wi-fi that does make a big difference in price as well so if you have any questions or thoughts or anything you'd like to share join us in the forums at level one text i'm wendell i'm signing out i'll see you there so foreigna lot of people have the expectation that you could go out and buy any alder lake motherboard and pair it with any alder lake cpu you might pick up the 12900k on sale and then want to pair it with a less expensive motherboard this is a bad idea i'm going to show you why all right for our motherboard roundup we've got msi asrock asus and gigabyte represented in our stack here accidentally messing things up we're going to do ddr5 boards separately there is a ddr4 version of this board we'll take a look at that i reviewed the ddr5 version of this board separately but we've got a slightly more expensive b660 motherboard a less expensive b660 motherboard depending on the day and then an inexpensive b660 motherboard not all of these motherboards will handle cpus the same way it's a really sort of interesting situation intel historically has had pl1 and pl2 those are i mean i'm oversimplifying here but how much power the cpu is permitted to consume for whatever duration and pl one it'll use more power for a little while it'll burst and try to deal with that workload but not just power usage but heat generation and heat generation sort of becomes an issue that 12 900 k it can use 241 watts flat out sustained and as long as you keep it cool it will run so you get a really interesting situation when you've got a 12 900k or 12700k or some other cpu because if you can keep it cool and you can keep it fed with power meaning that the motherboard can supply that power for a sustained period of time it'll run with higher performance now gaming is kind of a bursty workload the game will be busy the game will be less busy the game will be more busy um if you have fewer cores the core stay busy longer but in a nutshell it's a bursty workload whereas like cinebench sidobich is running flat out as fast as you can it's also a really weird situation because this is the i5 the i5 12 600k this is 10 cores it's six alder lake p cores plus four efficiency cores 10 cores total it is a very weird situation we find ourselves in that 10 cores would be a a thing that is an i5 like that's market competition doing that right i've also got the i3 which is six alder lake peak cores this is the i5 12 400 which is the six alder lake peak horse so four alder lake peak cores six alder like p cores six alder light peakers plus four efficiency cores this is sort of the chain that we we find ourselves going up in there's also the 12700k see when i started doing this video the 12 700k was about 350. but you can pretty regularly find it at least in the us for around 300 and the 1200 400k you can pretty regularly find for around 150. those are really good deals the 12700k is interesting though because it can consume up to 220 230 watts i mean it's 12 cores you've only lost four efficiency cores and the four efficiency cores didn't use that much power in the first place so with these motherboards i'm going to start with the 12700k and see how these motherboards do in a sustained workload with the 12700k and for gaming with the 12700k that's eight p cores and four efficiency cores and then we can step down accordingly to see what cpu would actually work do we actually even have any overclocking headroom because this pl1pl2 thing not technically an overclock that's just how much power the thing will use when it's running full time if we have a little bit of headroom in any of these motherboards we'll be able to overclock the 12700k just a little bit and have more overclocking headroom for the i5 the other i5 or the i3 it's a really interesting situation for our test bench we're going to be using the sapphire nitro plus for cooling this is a 360 millimeter aio it's sort of new from sapphire it's their initial offering i'm not gonna go too hard on it it is definitely an initial offering from sapphire but it's not too bad but it's maximum overkill for this build i mean our 12 400 has a thousand watt power supply with a 6900 xt in it that's overkill but what we're testing here is the motherboard so maybe it makes sense because i want you to be able to buy the 12 400 with a hundred ish dollar motherboard because that's a pretty good deal first up our gigabyte board at the time that i'm doing this video this is around 140 dollar us motherboard as dual pci express 4.0 by 4 m.2 two and a half gig lan it has built-in wi-fi built-in wi-fi or not is going to make a bigger difference to price in this area than most things the motherboard bundle is very basic you basically get an i o shield a movable wi-fi antenna take note here other companies that include the really cheap antennas even on this inexpensive board this is a good wi-fi antenna a couple sata cables coupling about two screws there's not even a manual it's just an installation paper if we take a closer look at our rear i o we've got two usb 2.0 combination ps2 mouse this is our wi-fi 6 interface here again wi-fi makes a bigger difference for price in this area than one might think we've got hdmi out dual display port out that's sort of a differentiator for this price class yeah the usb interface is one usb 3.2 gen 2 type c and everything else is 3.2 gen 1 plus 6 total usb 2.0 so everything is 5 gigabit except for this one type c which is 10 gigabit which is nice you're not always guaranteed 10 gigabit at this price point of course there's no type c front panel connector you do have a single 30 pin connection for your front panel usb as well as a couple of usb 2.0 headers here at the bottom and standard front panel audio out including spdif now take note of power delivery we do have a heatsink on this side but no heatsink along the top here oh it's going to be interesting when we get at our fleer next up asrock b660 pro rs remember this is our ddr4 motherboard from asrock it's got a similar configuration to many of the other boards but not everything's the same at the rear i o we have two usb 2.0 ports a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard port as we see on others bios flashback so that you can flash the bios after the fact that's pretty handy hdmi displayport usb 3.2 gen1 usb 3.2 gen1 under the gigabit lan so a total of four five gigabit usb ports and the lan is just single gigabit and then of course we've got our audio out this motherboard is a full size atx motherboard sometimes you see cost down motherboards come in in micro atx but this is a full atx that does give us an extra x16 slot physical which is x4 electrical through the chipset it is pci express 4.0 by 4. it is also worth noting that the pci express by 1 slots are open ended which means that if you run this motherboard with like a pci express you know buy two capture card or something that uses two pc express lanes it could still function in the pci express by one slot the card will physically fit in there it's just the extra bit of the card will stick out so interesting stuff this motherboard does feature a total of three m.2 one at the top here one here one here well technically four if you count the m.2 wi-fi which is optional here that is an e-key wi-fi interface another thing that i'm seeing that i like is a big heat sinks on the vrm area for our rs pro dual 30 pin connections plus usb type c so this motherboard has a total of seven four pin fan headers two at the top one at the bottom front edge two along the very bottom and one at the mid board this motherboard also has four rgb headers one 50 50 header at the bottom and three digital headers one at the bottom edge here and two up top we have four sata connections an rs232 header and a single usb 2.0 header for extra expansion i feel like that we can't complain about usb on this motherboard because it's got so much usb connectivity for the front panel usbc and four usb 3.0 but you can use a breakout cable to go from one of these back to the back panel so you get even more rear usb i o on to the next board the asrock b660m steel legend now this one is a micro atx motherboard but it costs about ten dollars more than the rs660 but it's got a two and a half gig lan and some other features we'll take a look at so in the box you get a you get a steel legend keycap some m.2 hardware rear i o shield also we got our dual sata six gigabit per second cables so for the steel legend what do you get for the extra 10 bucks well notice we've got two heatsinks above and below it's a nine phase vrm they say on the box so we'll test that you got your m.2 here m.2 for wi-fi as well as an m.2 down here it's really two usable m.2 plus an m.2 e key for wi-fi then we've got our ddr4 dimm slots usb-c front panel and a 30-pin front panel four four plus two sata connections dual front panel 2.0 usb 2.0 so we've got a total of five four pin fan headers we've got our pci express 5.0 by 16 expansion slot and then two pci expressed by one the ends of the slot are open so you could use a a slot with more lanes just know that it's going to run at fewer lanes so the car may not function correctly depending on exactly what it is for the rear i o we've got a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard two usb 2.0 ports four five gigabit usb ports a dragon land 2.5 gig that's based on the real technique we've got a 7.1 audio solution based on the realtek alc897 get display port out and hdmi out for your igpu and about flashback button we have three digital rgb headers two at the top here one at the bottom edge and a 50 50 you know analog rgb header next up in our test is the asus prime b660m a d4 why did they come up with these names this motherboard is interesting for two reasons one the first one that i got was doa can't hold that against asus sometimes weird things happen no no this is the replacement it works fine this motherboard also is really weird in another respect it has that pretty severe price fluctuation at the time that i'm shooting this video it is 130. i actually paid 140 for this one so it's already got gone down ten dollars in price i've seen it as much as 160. this motherboard does not include wi-fi so a little bit a little bit of volatility and pricing not the most expensive board but also definitely not the least expensive this motherboard does have two usb 10 gigabit ports at the rear i o four usb 2.0 ports one displayport two hdmi one intel intel gigabit single gigabit ethernet three audio jacks and a ps2 combo mouse and keyboard jack it has two m.2 slots four sata connections four five gigabit front panel usb connections and one type c front panel usb connection so asus has got the usb ports i've prepped their board for installation a couple things i noticed right away there's no heatsink at all for either m.2 i mean that's cost down board he sank yes he sank no at the top this does not bode well we have otherwise a pretty intelligent layout this x16 slot is actually only x1 electrical this one is x4 not a terrible layout and this pcie slot is limited to pc express 4.0 not five for the rear i o i think i would have much rather had four five gigabit ports than two 10 gigabit ports but maybe that's just me okay okay okay let's break our results down the first question was can we buy a b660 motherboard and run a higher end intel alder lake family cpu in it because you know things looks like too much has been cut the answer from initial testing is it depends a 12 900 k and a ks is simply too much for these boards i mean it might work but you're going to leave some performance on the table with that cpu and what kind of performance you're going to leave on the table well it's not gaming performance i mean the gaming performance of the 12 700k and the 12 900k is basically identical it's the productivity multi-core and the 129k that is really the difference and also needs more wattage which is really the differentiating factor on these lower cost motherboards how much power can you deliver to the cpu i mean the 12700k really is essentially the same as the 12 900k i mean okay the 12900k the clocks are just a little bit higher and the ks is a little bit higher than that but they're not good deals for gaming if you're building a gaming computer they're the highest in thing the 12 700k is probably the best bang for the buck at around 300 to 350 at the time that i'm making this video you can get the 12 400 which i also think is great and the 12 600k and get you know six alder lake you know the p cores but uh motherboards when the 12700k launched was over two hundred dollars more like three hundred dollars can you get a reasonable motherboard for 150 to power that 12700k and on down that's what i set out to answer now our setup our test setup and everything else is pretty simple we've got a radeon rx 6800 xt this is the highest end gpu that i think you'll probably test on this system we want to know if any of these boards lower overall game performance because the cpu is bottlenecking or something about the motherboard is throttling or something is slower than it should be so if the game performance is not worse with this gpu as we switch out motherboards then it's not going to be worse with any lower tier gpu as well i also tested with ddr4 3600 with a command rate of one this is pretty fast memory for ddr4 and it will be a challenge to less expensive motherboards you need more ground planes you need better routing now it's probably also true that if you're building a budget builder building a lower cost build you're not super concerned with memory speed but in case you are we tested our ssd it was a sabrina pcie 4 4 terabyte ssd plenty of room for everything again maximum overkill and our 360 millimeter sapphire aio also overkill for this build but done to make sure that the main variables are related to the motherboard and not really any of the other components that doesn't suggest that you need to go this overboard when you're doing your build that will let us test the cpu to see if the cpu works as good as it possibly can because if the same cpu is faster in one board than another and it's not down to an out of the box overclock then you know that's something we need to talk about that's maybe a problem but also do we have a little bit more uh overclocking headroom maybe there's another trade-off for other features it's until the cpu itself is properly supported we can't really talk about the other features and we also can't really talk about the cost trade-off unless the motherboards properly support the highest end cpu that you want to run so at the bottom of our result stack is the gigabyte b660m ds3h i really really think they made a big mistake not having a heatsink on the topmost vrm but also at the same time it was a little impressive that it worked as well as it did without a heatsink in our thermal testing and our flear thermal imaging they do overheat and they will cause our 12700k to throttle down uh when it's allowed to turbo all the time for basically pl2 all the time and that was a little bit of a rug pull on intel's part right before the alder lake cpus were launching they said hey we'll just let cp use turbo all the time we paid 140 for the board but without wi-fi it's also around 120 dollars making it the cheapest motherboard in the roundup stack and i will concede that for gaming it is serviceable but for cinebench it's going to be throttle city after about 30 minutes to an hour with good airflow on our test bench you know the vrm components they are rated for 115c and hardware info 64 only reported 100c but we're seeing well over 100c on our thermal imaging uh to say nothing of the actual hotspots gaming performance is not going to be hitting the board as hard as cinebench so gaming performance was basically okay it was also a little bit weird that out of the box gigabyte seemed to be configured to allow the 12700k to turbo all the time now that is something that intel actually supports and technically this generation is not really considered an overclock whereas in the past multi-core enhancement was kind of considered that it's not exactly the same thing i'm glossing over some details here but basically alder lake is permitted to use a lot more power and that's on by default when i think on this board it probably should be off by default next in our lineup was the asrock b660 pro rs this is also around 140 dollars but it has no on-board wi-fi and out of the box it has the more conservative cpu settings azeroth calls it dual tau boost so initially the performance was a little bit lower than the other boards that we tested however enabling this and only this allowed the cpu to consume 190 watts which is kind of what i expected and what the other boards were basically doing out of the box our vrms would heat to around 90 degrees c but with reasonable airflow this isn't a problem because they have a heatsink on both sets of vrms and everything there game performance was unaffected and initially the 3600 memory trained at a command rate of 2t whereas on other boards this same memory trained at a command rate of 1t however i was able to manually select 1t training and that was stable throughout testing including both warm and cold boots so the 12700k is the absolute maximum limit for this board and that is uh it's my opinion that this is sort of the minimum board that you want to go with if you're going to get a 12 700k and your cpu is going to use about 200 watts if you're going to use less of a cpu then you're not going to have a problem but also this seat this board lacks 10 gigabit uh usb and you're probably going to want to look at some of the other feature details of this motherboard before you you know make a final decision the asus board is really interesting when it comes to thermals letting it run for a long time a little less interesting but let me show you what i mean it telegraphs what its problem is going to be see if you can hear so i'm just running cinebench from being cool and it's not really that the cpu is struggling out of the box this motherboard will run that i7 at 210 watts and it configures pl2 for 241 watts at least according to hardware info 64. the problem is that after a while it'll throttle down you can see that in the cpu temperature initially the cpu temperature is like 80 88 degrees our 360 is keeping up with it it is a little bit it's not an overclock it's that cpu thing i was telling you about before the cpu's running within spec but at 210 watts but eventually the vrm on the motherboard can't keep up the cpu temperature falls off to 60-ish degrees c clocks fall off and you can hear the cpu fans working not quite as hard notice that even though cinebench is still running their fans have backed off it restarted you can hear that in the fans and now they've backed off again even though cinebench is still running what's going on the vrms the vrms are burn your finger off hot even with a single rear exhaust fan which is responsible for a decent amount of airflow over the board it just isn't enough to remove heat from a sustained workload like this it's definitely on the struggle bus after about an hour of running cinebench it's difficult for it to make it through time spy without crashing the reported temperature in hardware info 64 was only about 93 degrees c but the flear especially on the one side of vrm so it's quite a bit warmer than 93 degrees c is that related i don't know but it's concerning you can't make it through 3d mark time spy overall for gaming and other benchmarks with this motherboard it's a little bit of a mixed bag if you run far cry 6 for an extended period of time eventually it will start to thermal throttle at the default settings for the 12700k you can get a good 12 700k experience on this motherboard but it's necessary to dial the settings down a little bit the out of box defaults push that i7 12700k just a little bit too much in our full lineup of other motherboards the pl1 value the wattage value basically like how much is this using when you're running cinebench i mean i'm oversimplifying a little bit is reported to be between 190 and 220 watts with our i7 of course the more power the cpu uses the better it's going to do in benchmarks and everything else mostly artificial benchmarks it doesn't make much of a difference in gaming but there's something weird going on with this asus motherboard and the defaults because it's using just a little bit too much power and because it's using a little bit too much power it eventually will throttle even in my relatively open air test bench system that affects the benchmarks if the system is cool then the quick benchmarks like babco cyst mark and everything else look good but when it's been on for a while and it's been heating up and it's been running far cry or cinebench or whatever in the background then the performance is not as good our overall score from babco sysmark is 18 which isn't the best score of the bunch even though the cpu the power that the cpu is allowed to use on this board is a little higher than average compared with our other boards in the end attaining system stability by dialing things down from the defaults just a little bit in the asus bios made a pretty stable system but i don't think you should have to do that and necessarily you're going to have the skills to do that out of the box it's very surprising this result so i don't recommend this asus motherboard for the 12700k should be fine for the i5 12 600k and below but yeah wow surprising very surprising and then there's our asrock steel legend b660 this board cost more but it's definitely a spend more get more kind of a situation i couldn't find it without wi-fi but with wi-fi it was around 150 dollars so that's only about 10 more than the uh you know non-wi-fi version theoretically would be but ten dollars buys a lot uh better vrms and the steel legend had no problems in games or synthetic workloads in fact i even pushed a five gigahertz overclock pushing it beyond 200 watts and that steel legend handled that like a champ with this board i did need to tweak a few things in bios but my 3600 memory worked perfectly right out of the box in babco crossmark it scored exactly where i'd expected a non-throttling completely unleashed to 12700k to score i think still legend would probably be my overall recommendation if you're on a budget and if you're buying a 12 700k or less alder like families intel cpu and you're planning to you know juice it a little bit in fact the steel legend is probably overkill if you're gonna get you know one of the i5s or even an i3 i mean to be sure if if you buy a z690 board you will be getting more features and better stuff and if you buy a higher end b660 you're gonna get more features and better stuff but you can have the absolute best gaming performance that you can get on the intel platform without buying the 12900k or the kx and even without buying a 300 motherboard this is it even with the worst motherboard here a gaming type workload with the i7 was not really a failure per se just wouldn't be my recommendation because of the because of the aforementioned flaws now for the ddr5 boards that i mentioned before i've got a separate review of the msi mortar b660 but i've decided to break the ddr5 boards out into a separate roundup this video's already getting kind of long and i think it's a given that the ddr5 boards are going to cost a little bit more because ddr5 so we'll do a roundup of ddr5 motherboards next so if that's something you'd like to see or you've been considering a board or lamenting overboard or obsessing over a board let me know in the comments below what ddr5 b660 boards you've been considering and i will probably pick it up from newegg or micro center or somewhere and do a roundup like this with b660 to see how it goes now to be sure i think the 12 400 and the 12 600 k those are also really good value cpus both of those you get six alder lake p cores the big cores it's just a question of whether you want any e cores or not i mean an i5 that is 6p cores plus a bunch of e cores that's a lot of cores and an i5 that's kind of bananas that's going to work fine in any of these boards and the i the i5 12 400 and the i3 that i was showing before all of those will work fine in these boards for even extended workloads so we may actually be able to look at some of the even more low end like maybe the 610s i don't know i'm well this is level one this has been a quick roundup of b660 motherboards that are about 150 dollars i was kind of surprised that they they generally worked as well as they did for non you know rendering non cinebench type workloads but the feature differences in terms of what you get on the board the nick the audio the m.2 interfaces whether or not you get wi-fi that does make a big difference in price as well so if you have any questions or thoughts or anything you'd like to share join us in the forums at level one text i'm wendell i'm signing out i'll see you there so foreign\n"