z690 or b660?

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xfan10

Weaksauce
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Im doing a ITX build and wondered what would I be missing in terms of speed going with the b660 chip set versus the z690. Im using a i9-12900 (non-K) so no plans of overclocking. My main concern is that my RTX 3090 is unrestricted and the both M.2 SSDs 980 Pro's have no speed reductions due to the reduction in PCI Express lanes. The only external peripherals would be a mouse, keyboard and monitor.

Also could there a difference in future support for the RTX 40 series cards?
 
https://geekawhat.com/z690-vs-b660-motherboards-what-are-the-key-differences/?amp=1

Read this for the best answer to your question.

In short, other than overclocking (which is not relevant to your scenario), the Z690 simply supports more PCIe lanes, SATA ports, and M.2 slots.

mITX boards do not often have more than one M.2 slot, and the ones that do tend to be very expensive.

As for your 3090, both boards should be fine for it as pretty much every single board out there now has at least one PCIe x16 slot for GPUs. Both chipsets have at least one PCIe 5.0 slot so if you go to the 4000 series and it requires 5.0, you'll be fine. Even if you stay on 4.0, it won't be crippling.
 
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#f=8&c=154,152&h=1,8&E=2,6

Just did a quick search on PC Part Picker and it showed a few boards that would fit what you would be looking for, but if I were you, I'd look closely at any boards you were interested in and make sure they support everything you need, primarily PCIe 5.0 (but in everyday use, 4.0 is again not going to be crippling if you go to next-gen GPU). All of these were filtered to have at least two M.2 slots.
Good luck on your ITX build. They're a ton of fun in my opinion. I'm curious to know what components you'll be using, especially the case. Lots of excellent case options out there now, quite a change from many years ago where we were pretty limited on the SFF side.
 
JonCZ said:
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#f=8&c=154,152&h=1,8&E=2,6

Just did a quick search on PC Part Picker and it showed a few boards that would fit what you would be looking for, but if I were you, I'd look closely at any boards you were interested in and make sure they support everything you need, primarily PCIe 5.0 (but in everyday use, 4.0 is again not going to be crippling if you go to next-gen GPU). All of these were filtered to have at least two M.2 slots.
Good luck on your ITX build. They're a ton of fun in my opinion. I'm curious to know what components you'll be using, especially the case. Lots of excellent case options out there now, quite a change from many years ago where we were pretty limited on the SFF side.
Click to expand...
This was my last build on here 5 years ago.
https://hardforum.com/threads/ncase...n-first-post.1717132/page-647#post-1043433770

Here is my PCpartpicker list. Final components arrive tomorrow. I want to get the next Ncase design but for now Im going with the NR200P. They dont have it in the part picker so thats the only thing off in the list. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HN9yxs

what was confusing is having enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for the M.2's. its my understanding they require 4 and the mobo has 6 instead of 12 like the z690. but then i leanred the CPU has 20. So 16 for the GPU, 4 for the front M.2 and the chipset provides 4 for the rear M.2 so seems its all good.
 
JonCZ said:
https://geekawhat.com/z690-vs-b660-motherboards-what-are-the-key-differences/?amp=1

Read this for the best answer to your question.

In short, other than overclocking (which is not relevant to your scenario), the Z690 simply supports more PCIe lanes, SATA ports, and M.2 slots.

mITX boards do not often have more than one M.2 slot, and the ones that do tend to be very expensive.

As for your 3090, both boards should be fine for it as pretty much every single board out there now has at least one PCIe x16 slot for GPUs. Both chipsets have at least one PCIe 5.0 slot so if you go to the 4000 series and it requires 5.0, you'll be fine. Even if you stay on 4.0, it won't be crippling.
Click to expand...
This is the best article ive ready clarifying this issue. Thank you.
 
xfan10 said:
This was my last build on here 5 years ago.
https://hardforum.com/threads/ncase...n-first-post.1717132/page-647#post-1043433770

Here is my PCpartpicker list. Final components arrive tomorrow. I want to get the next Ncase design but for now Im going with the NR200P. They dont have it in the part picker so thats the only thing off in the list. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HN9yxs

what was confusing is having enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for the M.2's. its my understanding they require 4 and the mobo has 6 instead of 12 like the z690. but then i leanred the CPU has 20. So 16 for the GPU, 4 for the front M.2 and the chipset provides 4 for the rear M.2 so seems its all good.
Click to expand...
Your old build looked really cool. Hope your new one will come out just as, or even more so, cool as that old one. Good luck with it.

Not all of the M.2s require four lanes. Some require two or even only one, but it has a direct impact on the speed of the drive. So does the PCIe version. In theory, though, it won't make a really noticeable difference in daily use. Benchmarking, sure. Even with an M.2 SSD using two PCIe 3.0 lanes is going to be at least triple the speed of any SATA 3 SSD interface.
In the case of the B660 board you listed, both your M.2s will be using four PCIe 4.0 lanes each, so they should be lightning fast, 12x the speed of a SATA 3 drive. I'm not an expert on the chipsets and lanes and all, but to my understanding, you are correct. The chipset will have six of its own, and the CPU should have 20, meaning your GPU and one M.2 will take up those and then the second would utilize four of the six on the board.

Let us know how the build goes!
 
JonCZ said:
https://geekawhat.com/z690-vs-b660-motherboards-what-are-the-key-differences/?amp=1

Read this for the best answer to your question.

In short, other than overclocking (which is not relevant to your scenario), the Z690 simply supports more PCIe lanes, SATA ports, and M.2 slots.

mITX boards do not often have more than one M.2 slot, and the ones that do tend to be very expensive.

As for your 3090, both boards should be fine for it as pretty much every single board out there now has at least one PCIe x16 slot for GPUs. Both chipsets have at least one PCIe 5.0 slot so if you go to the 4000 series and it requires 5.0, you'll be fine. Even if you stay on 4.0, it won't be crippling.
Click to expand...
ITX boards often have two NVME slots nowadays. Its pretty uncommon for otherwise decent ITX boards, to only have 1, anymore. That said, Gigabyte did just release a B660 ITX board with 1 NVME, which costs more than $200...

The main things to check between Z690 and B660 are whether or not the PCI-E 16 slot is PCI-E 5.0 or 4.0 (B660 is capable of 5.0, but some brands use a 4.0 slot to keep the cost lower). For ITX, even B660 should have both NVME slots supporting PCI-E 4.0.

On an ATX board, if a B660 offered 3 SSD slots, one of them might be cut-down to PCI-E 3.0. And it could also disable some SATA ports, when you use that slot.
If you want B660 and ITX for a 12900 ----- I would say the only real choice is Asus B660i. It does use DDR5. Gigabyte's B660 ITX board uses DDR4, but only offers 1 NVME slot. Asrock has an H670 ITX board which is a fine, lower cost board. 2 NVME. But the VRM heatsink is likely too small for a 12900 (with unlocked power limits) at full load.

For Z690 ITX boards, by far teh best value, is Asrock's board:
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162037?Description=asrock z690i&cm_re=asrock_z690i-_-13-162-037-_-Product

I have one. its been pretty great and they keep lowering the price. It even has thunderbolt 4.
Techpowerup says the VRM can be a bit hot with a 12900k at full load but....The other Z690 ITX boards have similar temps in that scenario. I have a 12700k. I like the bios a lot and in particular----how the bios handles updates. it auto searches your drives/thumb drives for the bios update file. You don't have to navigate around and look for it. And it starts updating right away, no restart before applying the update. Very stable, no issues. I thought it had issues, but it turned out to be bad DDR5 RAM. replaced it with the another of the same exact RAM and its been great.
 
The other big difference between Z690 and B660 is for RAM tweaking.

You can use XMP profiles on B660. But, your voltage options are limited. So, if you want to overclock the RAM even further than XMP, you may not be able to tweak the voltage enough, to make it stable. RAM voltage options are fully unlocked, with Z690.
 
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