Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent features and best-in-class design
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2022
Arguably the main feature on Z series boards is overclocking, and mostly gone are the days where overclocking provided substantial benefit. Looking to the B series, you can find most of the same features without paying the Z series premium, and all you're giving up is some extra power handling that does nothing for non-K CPUs, and a couple extra M.2 slots you weren't going to use. The B660M Mortar comes with two standard M.2 connectors, and that's plenty. Oh, and actually, while you can't overclock the CPU, you CAN overclock the RAM. Now in fairness, that can be a finicky process. But hey, welcome to overclocking, am I right? The point is, you can do it, and if your use case involves a lot of rapid data shuffling to and from RAM, the gains can be quite substantial.
What else? The design is top-notch for a B series board. A beefy VRM ensures plenty of clean power available on demand for your CPU, and the substantial heat sinks all over the board help to move the heat away from your precious components and allow your case fans to do what they're meant to do. Lower temperatures, consistent performance, and less wear and tear. I appreciate that the board includes matching heat sinks for your M.2 drives as well, it's a nice touch. And seriously, I'm in awe at the sheer weight of this lad. For a small board, this has some heft to it. Absolute unit.
This board is available in both DDR4 and DDR5 flavors, which I appreciate. As of June 2022, DDR5 still costs a lot more than I'd like to spend. And while my workloads do appreciate high bandwidth RAM, it's hard for me to justify paying twice as much for half the RAM when the performance gap isn't night and day. It will be eventually, but that's a few years off--by which time I'll probably have a new machine anyway. In the meantime, I can carry over the perfectly fine 16 gigs of DDR4 I had in my last machine and either save $50 now or double it to 32 gigs for only $50 extra. Incidentally, I'm loving the four RAM slots.
Built-in WiFi? I almost never use WiFi on my PC. But the once or twice a year that I do... it's going to be great having it for the rare occasion I need it, instead of not having it, needing to spend $15-$20 on Amazon to order a WiFi USB adapter, wait a couple days, doesn't quite work, return it, order a PCIe card... just skip the hassle and pay an extra $10 up front for the feature, built-in, working perfectly. Boom.
My only gripe is that at MSRP, you're paying twice the price of an entry-level board. Sure, that lesser board will run hot, your performance might suffer by 5, 6, 7 percent, and it will have one less USB connector than you wanted, or one less SATA channel, or one less PCIE slot, etc. But if all you wanted was a computer that just barely gets the job done, that would be a perfect fit. If you want a fine machine that does everything you need with effortless grace, the B660M Mortar is my top pick. And if you can find it on sale like I did, the price isn't even an issue--this was well worth every cent of the $145 I paid.