So I went out and purchased the Asrock B560 Pro4 which costs $125. After all, you can run a Ryzen 9 5950X without any performance restrictions on $110 AMD B550 boards like the Gigabyte B550M DS3H and MSI B550M Pro-VDH WiFi, for example.
A mess o trouble pro#
I also tried out the Gigabyte B560M Aorus Pro AX ( $180) which again mirrored the performance previously seen with the Z590 boards.īut because we were looking for the best budget motherboards, we wanted to see how well the cheaper boards handled parts like the i5-11400 and i7-11700. However, the Tomahawk is a $200 B560 motherboard, which is not inexpensive, and therefore the results were as expected. Using the MSI B560 Tomahawk, the 11400F sustained the same 4.2 GHz all-core frequency that we saw on the Z590 boards, and therefore performance remained the same. MSI even told me it was to be expected that B560 motherboards would offer the same level of performance as their Z590 counterparts, but it turns out that's not always the case. Performance was identical to Z590 boards I'd tested from the likes of Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. Prior to this testing, the only B560 board that I had looked at was the MSI B560 Tomahawk which we used to review and benchmark the 11400F for our review. That's right, we're not talking about parts like the Core i9-11900K, but rather processors you will be using with a budget B560 motherboard. What I've discovered is quite alarming and something all potential Intel buyers need to be made aware of.ĭepending on the B560 motherboard, performance of locked 65 watt parts like the 1140 can be negatively impacted by over 30%. I've found testing Intel B560 boards so frustrating that I had to stop testing to write this article, warning readers of the possible pitfalls when buying one such board. and what a frustrating journey that is proving to be. There's little point pairing a locked Intel CPU with a Z-series motherboard, especially at a price premium, so I decided to shift my focus towards finding the best value B560 boards. They're now enabled for memory overclocking and with K-SKU processors being somewhat pointless due to the limited overclocking headroom, locked parts like the i5-11400 offer the most value and therefore make the most sense. These new B-series motherboards make a lot more sense than before on paper. However, the focus of today's article is not Z590 motherboards, but rather Intel's B560. It's not great, but at the end of the day, we're only talking about a ~10% frequency discrepancy for sustained workloads and in real-life scenarios, that should typically account to little or nothing in today's games. Still, Asrock is operating within the Intel spec, they just happen to be using the minimum specification, whereas Asus, MSI and Gigabyte are maxing that out. In other words, for sustained core-heavy workloads, Asrock Z590 motherboards will clock 11th-gen CPUs around 10% lower than boards from competing brands. However, Asrock follows the Intel base spec, commonly referred to as the "TDP specification." What that means is the 11900K will boost up to 4.8 GHz for a period of up to 56 seconds before dropping down to 4.3 GHz, where it runs at a package power of 125 watts. Depending on the motherboard the 11900K will boost to, and maintain, an all-core frequency of 4.7 to 4.8 GHz. I've found that Z590 motherboards from Asus, MSI and Gigabyte all run without power limits, or at least limits that will heavily restrict the performance of parts like the Core i9-11900K. For the most part, Z590 motherboards run Intel 11th-gen processors without any enforced power limits, which is perfectly fine and within the loosely defined Intel specification.
I've been testing a ton of Intel Z590 motherboards recently for VRM thermal performance and this has allowed me to take a look at how each board is configured out of the box.
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