Month: March 2022

MSI MPG Z690 CARBON EK X – HardwareCooking

by

Now let’s talk about monoblock . Supplied by EK Water Blocks, we are on a product that will allow in this case to cool the processor, the power stage and even the first M.2 SSD slot via a custom watercooling circuit. Be careful, this is not a product suitable for everyone, there is some work behind to be done to be able to use it. This is a monoblock designed especially for this motherboard (MSI MPG Z690 CARBON) and it is therefore not possible to use it on another reference.

Read more @ HardwareCooking (French)

GIGABYTE B660 AORUS MASTER DDR4 – HardwareCooking

by

The motherboard arrives in a box in a dominant black, here no visual of the motherboard, only the Aorus logo, which is a falcon. We have blue and orange colors, the historic color of the brand. The only technical mentions are the presence of DDR4, support for the 12th generation and the presence of the B660 chipset.

Read more @ HardwareCooking (French)

ASRock Z690 Taichi – FunkyKit

by

The motherboard is absolutely feature-packed and comes in a matte black finish with some gold trimmings thats’s typical of their Taichi series. The entire board is covered by serveal large full length heatshield/heatspreaders that helps cool your SSDs. Near the top of the board, you’ll find extra heatsinks with heatpipe that helps to cool the VRMs/Mosfets surrounding the processor socket. There’s also a bundled 3cm high performance fan for better cooling and silence performance. 

Read more @ FunkyKit

MSI MPG Z690 EDGE WIFI – Guru3D

by

The looks are fantastic, the features pretty grand. There is a pre-installed I/O shield on the MSI MPG Z690 Edge Wifi DDR5 motherboard, as well as a black chassis with heatsinks to display its internals in black. VRM on this one includes 16 actual phases (15+1), a PWM-Controller RAA229131, and MOSFETs CPU are 15x 75A RAA220075 and for the SoC 1x 75A RAA220075. There are four M.2 slots on the board, and each one has a heatsink attached to it. Furthermore, they are all capable of running at PCIe 4.0 speeds. Sixteen PCIe 5.0 lanes can be supported by the first x16 slot, whereas only four PCIe 3.0 lanes can be supported by the other x16 slots. 

Read more @ Guru3D

GIGABYTE Z690I AORUS ULTRA DDR4 – TweakTown

by

In testing, the Ultra DDR4 performed quite well. We did see some decrease in performance, likely due to the use of DDR4 over the DDR5 we have tested previous boards with. That said, performance loss was minimal, around 100 points in both 1t and nT R23, while other benchmarks such as PCMark and 3DMark showed no loss at all. Storage performance was slightly lower than we typically see, peaking at 420MB/s in 3DMark Storage but again not too far off the average.

Read more @ TweakTown

GIGABYTE Z690 AORUS TACHYON – TweakTown

by

While the Tachyon isn’t necessarily considered a gamers board, this platform is built ground up for you for those who enjoy the tweaking aspect of overclocking. Adding to this solid enough connectivity with USB 3.2 and enough ports between the rear I/O and internal chassis expansion to handle all your peripheral needs.

We should mention its ability to expand into Thunderbolt 4 territory with a likely upcoming AIC and a solid network stack between the Intel 2.5Gbe and WiFi6e to make this a board certainly worth looking at.

Read more @ TweakTown

ASUS ROG STRIX B660-F GAMING WIFI – HardwareCooking

by

This motherboard is intended for use with 12th generation Intel Alder Lake-S processors. Indeed, we are here on a new LGA 1700 socket and only this generation of motherboard (600 series chipset) is compatible. Thus, we can for example place an i9-12900K , i7-12700K or even the i5-12600K on it to quote the references with unlocked coefficient, but this motherboard will be more suitable for non-K CPUs like the i5-12400 or why not the i9-12900. Although the B660 chipset does not allow CPU overclocking, memory OC is still possible.

Read more @ HardwareCooking (French)

ASUS ProArt B660-CREATOR D4 – Guru3D

by

The B660 board is equipped with an LGA 1700 socket and can support the entire line of Intel’s Alder Lake Desktop CPUs. It can house the unlocked lineup all the way up to the Core i9-12900K; however, a preferable option will be to outfit this board with the non-K series processors that launched alongside the B660 series. The ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 features an 8-pin + 4-pin connector for powering the CPU socket and is powered by a 12+1 phase digital power supply solution (CPU-only) comprising of 50A SIC654phases paired with a PWM-Controller: ASP2100 / RT3628AE. The motherboard features dark heatsinks above the power supply, providing adequate cooling for the electrical components beneath.

Read more @ Guru3D

MSI MAG Z690 TOMAHAWK WIFI – Pause Hardware

by

People accustomed to the TOMAHAWK range will quickly know what it is. Indeed, the packaging has not changed too much compared to the generation before. First, on the front, we find the missile with this color gradient of the most beautiful effect. As for the back, we find the specifications of the card, an overview of the I/O and a few other features.

Read more @ Pause Hardware (French)