ASRock B660M-HDVP/D5 LGA 1700 Intel B660 SATA 6Gb/s DDR5 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: - Currently cheapest B660 board by a good margin
- Supports RAM overclocking
- 2 80mm nvme slots (1 gen3x4 and 1 gen4x4)
- Cnvi wifi support
- Small board size
- Intel ethernet controller

Cons: - No 10gbps USB support
- No multi-gig ethernet
- No troubleshooting LEDs (or any LEDs)
- Only 2 RAM slots

Overall Review: As far as I can tell, this board shares the same PCB as the H610-HDV, and as a result doesn't offer many additional features compared to that board. The ones it does have (an extra gen4x4 nvme slot, RAM overclocking and 2 extra 5gbps usb ports) may justify the current 10 dollar premium though. The Gen4 nvme option will be important as time goes on even if there's not much need for it currently, and RAM overclocking is nice if you plan to use the Intel iGPU (though remember that h610 supports 3200mhz already, compared to 2666 on h510, so the overclocking features are not as big a gain in this generation).

The limit of 2 RAM slots compared to 4 on most B660 boards could potentially mean it allows better RAM overclocking, but I have not been able to get any kit completely stable past 3466mhz. That may be due to the memory controller in my CPU though.

The BIOS has no options for BCLK overclocking, but that's to be expected. The only big surprise was an option to enable AVX-512, which I have not tried. I updated my board to BIOS 3.02, as the board would not consistently boot with 2 sticks of RAM with the BIOS it shipped with. The lack of any trouble LEDs or POST beeps made it almost impossible to diagnose why the board was not booting when I first assembled it. If your board seems DoA, be sure to try just a single stick of RAM in either slot (you may need to try different combinations of RAM and slot) and if you can get it to the BIOS, be sure to update it. Since doing that mine has been faultless booting with any RAM kit I've tried in it.

With a 12100f, stress tests results in the VRMs getting up to about 80c. A 12400 would probably be okay on this board, but I would not be comfotable putting a 12600k or any chip with more than 6 physical cores on here. That does unfortunately limit your future upgrade paths.

So it's best to think of this board as an h610 with some bonus options, rather than comparing it to other b660s. Really the only reason I would consider spending more on any h610 board would be for 10gbps USB. You could get 8gbps using one of the PCIe x1 slots, or else take up the x16 (or one of the m.2s) but it will hurt the value proposition compared to other b660 boards that include the feature at that point. That's the one big omission on this board that I would otherwise be completely satisfied with.

Pros: None

Cons: MAJOR CON with my unit was both the B channels on the dram slots are completely unfunctional, on initial boot with a stick in A2 and B2, the pc did not post and the post light check went off on the DRAM light, i checked to see if it was a ram issue, so i installed a single ram into A channel, worked just fine, then did the same thing with the other stick, again booted just fine, then tried one stick in B channel, did not boot, tried the other and again did not boot. i attempted this test on every channel both single and dual channel and ran both sticks in single channel, in every instance when ram was installed in A channel whether 2 sticks or just 1 everything worked, but the B channel seems to be completely damaged, didnt boot on 2 single channel or 1 single channel or dual channel. horrible experience and a stressful process to go through.

Overall Review: very disappointed in this asrock motherboard, seemed promising but it caused me way too much stress then what it was worth.