B560 Motherboard group test
Don’t ignore B series motherboards anymore.
B560 motherboards are interesting. You read that right! With exceptions, previous generation B series motherboards were mostly underwhelming unless you were specifically building a budget system. They tended to have weak power delivery, lacked connectivity and they were stuck with limited memory speeds. While you’d still expect entry level B560 boards to remain on the basic side, the premium level B560 boards can be superior to similarly priced Z590 boards. They still lack CPU overclocking, but with limited overclocking headroom on K series 11th generation CPUs anyway, OC support doesn’t weigh very highly this generation. We’ve got a couple of premium B560 boards in the labs for a look. Should you consider one over a similarly priced Z590 board?
WHAT’S NEW?
PCIe 4.0 makes its debut with 11th Gen CPUs, and it’s supported on B560 motherboards too. You get a full speed PCIe 4.0 x16 slot to suit modern GPUs and a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot. In addition, you get another 12 PCIe 3.0 lanes from the chipset. Four of these will most likely be taken by a second M.2 slot leaving eight lanes for some combination of a third slot and/or PCIe slots or additional controllers. While a single GPU system with a fast SSD and a couple of SATA drives will perform perfectly well, if you’re planning to use two or more M.2 drives plus expansion cards, you’ll probably run out of lanes, and in that case you’re better off with a Z590 board.
B560 motherboards finally introduce memory overclocking support. This fixes our biggest gripe with B460. Now that DDR4 is a well and truly mature technology, with DDR4-3200 and now DDR4-3600 costing little more than a 2400 or 2666MHz kit, it makes sense to allow support for faster speeds.
OC LIMITATIONS
Some will say that Intel should allow CPU overclocking with the B560 chipset like AMD does with its B550 boards. It’s important to remember that AMD’s processors don’t consume anywhere near as much power. The cheapest 11th Gen K CPU, the 11600K can pull over 200W under a heavy AVX-512 load. Even a 16-core Ryzen 5950X doesn’t consume that much. AVX-512 isn’t widely used in consumer software but it is there, and the boards have to be able to run under the worst-case scenarios. Our greatest criticism of 11th Generation CPUs is their high power consumption and to cope with this, B560 boards feature improved VRM designs compared to their predecessors. Don’t expect too much from a cheap board, but almost anything in the $200+ range will feature a VRM that can run an 11900K, and though you can’t overclock, you’re not missing out on much. Rocket Lake processors are already pushed to their limits.
ADVANCED I/O
Connectivity support has really improved, with B560 boards often matching similarly priced Z590 boards. USB 3.2 Gen 2 can be found on mid-range B560 boards, and USB Gen 2 2x2 (20Gbps) even appears on the higher end boards. 2.5G Ethernet controllers are increasingly common which is a godsend for anyone used to transferring files over a NAS or making frequent backups. Wi-Fi 6 can also be found and a handful of boards even offer Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi will continue to be rare on budget boards, though some include the older WiFi 5 (802.11ac) standard.
For our testing we used the flagship i9-11900K. The 11900K is admittedly an unlikely pairing with anything other than a mid or high-end Z590 board, but we’re covering high end B560 boards, and if they struggle with a stock 11900K then they are poor boards, it’s as simple as that. It also means that if they can handle an 11900K, then they can handle anything you care to throw at them.